Have you ever needed ‘Hello World’ in real life? Me neither.
Over 15 years ago, I wrote my first line of code. Since then, I’ve coded for some of the world’s largest mining companies, AND taught others the joy of coding. HTML, CSS, and SQL have always been fun puzzles for me, but object-oriented programming languages like .Net, Python, PHP and even JavaScript seemed like insurmountable hurdles where I struggled to move past the fundamentals to actually make something useful. I convinced myself that I just ‘wasn’t made to be a programmer’ and resigned myself to being a weird combination of front-end-ish-with-database-knowledge, never achieving the elusive title of Full Stack Developer.
Then two things happened: I started working on TALL (Tailwind, Alpine.js, Laravel + Livewire) stack projects, and I got a Copilot subscription. Suddenly, the complex tasks that used to be handballed to someone else in the team seemed within reach, and I was up and running on one of the world’s fastest growing development frameworks.
Whether you or someone you know are stuck on the basics, or you are just curious to see how easy it is to spin up a brand new Laravel application from scratch (and how to use AI code assistants so you get better at coding, instead of worse) - join me as I demonstrate how I went from ‘Hello World’ to full-stack programming in less than a year!

I delivered a short version of this talk aimed at a Laravel audience at Laracon AU 2024. While I do mention the stack a bit and provide code examples, it's worth mentioning that most of the advice is platform agnostic and more aimed at encouraging attendees to think about the way we teach and learn coding.