Every Laravel developer uses middleware. Authentication, rate limiting, CORS - it's all there, quietly doing its job. But middleware is far more powerful than a few checks before your controller runs.

In this session, we:ll explore how Laravel's middleware pipeline really works, from intercepting requests and transforming responses to wrapping queued jobs with reusable behaviour. Through practical examples, we'll tackle multi-tenant context, job locking, retries, and rate limiting, uncover some subtle pitfalls, and discover just how much heavy lifting middleware can do without your controllers or jobs ever knowing about it.

You'll leave with a fresh appreciation for one of Laravel's most useful and surprisingly versatile tools, and a few ideas for code you can delete when you get home.