Design Engineering at Laravel: Jason Beggs on Building Laravel Cloud  🔗 **Source:** [Design Engineering at Laravel: Jason Beggs on Building Laravel Cloud](https://share.snipd.com/episode/fa9b47e7-0cdf-451e-ae5a-12426cf201a7) ## Highlights - **Tailwind Conversions Sparked A Career** - Jason became known as the 'Tailwind guy' after publicly converting Laravel News and later building many Laravel landing pages. - That visibility led Taylor Otwell to DM him for the Vapor landing page and eventually to contracting and full-time work on Cloud. Transcript: Jason Beggs But yeah, I think the first thing that I ended up working on really publicly was the Laravel News conversion. I think towind was alpha. Was it really? Maybe later when we did that. So it was like super early. Yeah. So I did that. I converted the existing design to Tailwind. And then a few months later, I actually ended up doing some Tailwind work for y'all. And it kind of took off from there it was kind of all an accident and yeah i love it it's a happy accident yeah for those who know jason but not in person you may be surprised to find that someone Matt Stauffer Who has an incredibly quick wit and has always got something very funny to say it's also very kind of peaceful kind of quiet and of course you know you got like a slow southern drawl right So it's just so funny because it's like, Eric, I'm used to Eric having the accent that he has, right? But I think that you have garnered the majority of your reputation for who you are by just your presence on social media, where it's always super quick and it's super funny. And so it's so funny because we always think of like a New York or New England or a type when we're thinking like really quick humor. And I'm like, I just love, I love the balance of the, the slow Southern accent and all kinds of stuff together with how freaking brilliant you are. So anyway, thank you for hanging out. I'm just having a great time with this. So as you know, one of the first questions that I asked at the beginning of the podcast for everybody is what is your story of coming to Laravel look like? And that doesn't have to start day one at Laravel. And because you just wrote the blog post, I think it's actually super relevant. If somebody didn't read that blog post, can you kind of tell us like what was the story that you recapped in it? Jason Beggs Yeah, so I kind of already told the beginning of it. The gist of the blog post was like, I sent two email or one was a Twitter DM and one was an email. And those two opportunities kind of catapulted into my entire career. So one of them was Eric from Laravel News. He posted that he was looking for someone to convert the Laravel News site to Tailwind. And I just, like, off of him, DM'd him'd him and like asked if he'd be interested in me doing it. And that actually ended up happening. So that was one opportunity. And then the other one was, I was kind of looking for something new to do. And I always admired Titan and the team that you built. So I just kind of cold emailed you. I like just saying like if y'all were ever hiring that i'd be interested yeah and i think y'all weren't really looking for anybody at the time but like you emailed me back and we got on a Call just to kind of get to know each other and like less than a week from when i sent the first email, you email me back and it's like, I got this opportunity. Do you want to do a contract job? So I did that for y'all. And then from there, I don't know, it just kind of took off on Twitter and I kind of got a name for myself as like the tailwind guy, like you said. And I think later that year I ended up doing, like Taylor just cold DM'd me on Twitter and asked if I wanted to build a landing page for him. I think it was the Vapor landing page. So, of course, I did that. And that ended up, I think I built, I don't know, like 15 or more sites for Laravel. Wow. Over the course of probably three or four years. And yeah, kind of, I built that relationship with Taylor just as like the tailwind guy. So then after they got funding, I was like the first guy he thought of when they needed somebody to do front end on cloud. ([Time 0:01:34](https://share.snipd.com/snip/61eacad1-3980-4b1c-b2ba-8761283c09b4)) - **Cold Email Led To Joining Laravel Cloud** - Jason Beggs cold-emailed Matt Stauffer and later accepted a short contract that led to full-time work at Laravel Cloud. - That first outreach plus a Tailwind conversion for Laravel News created his reputation and opened doors including building many Laravel sites. Transcript: Jason Beggs It. The gist of the blog post was like, I sent two email or one was a Twitter DM and one was an email. And those two opportunities kind of catapulted into my entire career. So one of them was Eric from Laravel News. He posted that he was looking for someone to convert the Laravel News site to Tailwind. And I just, like, off of him, DM'd him'd him and like asked if he'd be interested in me doing it. And that actually ended up happening. So that was one opportunity. And then the other one was, I was kind of looking for something new to do. And I always admired Titan and the team that you built. So I just kind of cold emailed you. I like just saying like if y'all were ever hiring that i'd be interested yeah and i think y'all weren't really looking for anybody at the time but like you emailed me back and we got on a Call just to kind of get to know each other and like less than a week from when i sent the first email, you email me back and it's like, I got this opportunity. Do you want to do a contract job? So I did that for y'all. And then from there, I don't know, it just kind of took off on Twitter and I kind of got a name for myself as like the tailwind guy, like you said. And I think later that year I ended up doing, like Taylor just cold DM'd me on Twitter and asked if I wanted to build a landing page for him. I think it was the Vapor landing page. So, of course, I did that. And that ended up, I think I built, I don't know, like 15 or more sites for Laravel. Wow. Over the course of probably three or four years. And yeah, kind of, I built that relationship with Taylor just as like the tailwind guy. So then after they got funding, I was like the first guy he thought of when they needed somebody to do front end on cloud. So at the time, I actually had talked to them about joining full time probably back in the spring of 2024. But I was pretty happy in my freelance career at that point. So it didn't really work out. But later in the summer, I think maybe June, July, he emailed me and asked if I would be interested in just doing like a month or two of contract work just to kind of get them basically to Laracon where we had announced cloud. So I ended up agreeing to that. And by the end of like the month or whatever, I was having so much fun. And like they offered again, they tried to convince me to join full time and I accepted this time. ([Time 0:03:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/75fe725b-6c3a-4927-b486-ae672cc370af)) - **Design Engineering Means Pairing Early With Designers** - Design engineering at Laravel blends close collaboration across designers, PMs, and backend engineers to think through UI/UX and edge cases before coding. - Jason pairs early with designers to preempt bugs and iterates with them when edge cases arise during implementation. Transcript: Jason Beggs Kind of thinking through everything from a UI UX perspective and just making sure that everything's as easy to use and polished. Make sure we think through all the edge cases before we ever even write any code, ideally. And then once it gets into code, I'm obviously trying to keep things as maintainable and clean as possible. Make sure we actually cover all those edge cases, make sure it matches the designs that we came up with. Oftentimes we run into additional edge cases once we're in there and kind of think through it a little bit deeper. So I'll work back and forth with designers to, like, I hit this bug or, like, this edge case, what should we do here? And just kind of thinking through all the features from that kind of perspective. ([Time 0:12:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/255f35ab-eaa8-45a9-94cb-67ea297040a9)) - **Dogfooding Drives Practical UX Choices** - Being a 'perfect user' shapes product decisions because the team are Laravel developers who dogfood Cloud daily. - Jason notes many features are built from what the team wants since they use Cloud themselves, speeding sensible UX choices. Transcript: Jason Beggs But yeah, I think back to the UX perspective, I think it definitely does help that I am the perfect user of cloud. Like it makes it a lot easier. So like when we're building things, I'm like, what would I want out of this feature? And that's basically what we build a lot of times because I am like our whole team pretty much is Laravel developers. So we know exactly what we want and ([Time 0:15:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d56d89bc-9989-41e8-85a1-e54c4675e908)) - **Study React To Avoid Effect Pitfalls** - Learn React intentionally by studying docs and focused courses to avoid common pitfalls like overusing effects. - Jason recommends the React docs article 'You Might Not Need an Effect' and Kent C. Dodds' Epic React course. Transcript: Jason Beggs With ai like you'll litter use effects everywhere and they can really start to shoot you in the foot. So I definitely recommend reading that article. And then I think I took Kent C. Dodd's course. Epic React, I think it's called. It was really good and covered everything from the basics all the way to really advanced stuff. ([Time 0:18:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/136449dd-e39e-4fea-ad71-49221ebb8de2)) - **AI Excels At Refactors Not Polished Design** - Jason uses AI for productivity tasks and heavy code refactors but finds it weak at producing polished Figma designs. - He leverages tools like Cursor, OpenCode, and Claude for refactors and day-to-day assistance rather than full design generation. Transcript: Jason Beggs Yeah, I would say probably my time which is not a lot i'm experimenting with different uh ways of using ai like day to day i'm kind of just using cloud cursor open code to like help me work Not definitely not ai maxing like some people running yeah 20 different clouds at the same time but I use it for day-to stuff. But stuff like Figma, building Figma designs, like really polished designs, it's not great at. So I'm still trying to kind of figure out some good workflows for that kind of thing. But yeah, everything's all about AI now. ([Time 0:20:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e0984967-7379-4812-817d-50c6b487d622)) - **Use AI For Large Refactors Then QA Thoroughly** - Use AI to automate large, repetitive refactors across many files, then run tests or manual QA to validate changes. - Jason used AI to change patterns across ~80 files, backing backend refactors with test suites but relying on manual QA for visual front-end work. Transcript: Jason Beggs So like when we first started cloud, like we didn't really know React. So we had some kind of bad practices in there yeah and we were moving like blazing fast so yeah there was no time to slow down and refactor things and we built up some tech debt basically So i've used ai to do some pretty pretty heavy refactors over time and it works really good at that. Like taking a pattern you have, changing it to something else across 80 different files. Jason Beggs It's great at that. Yeah. Do you guys have a lot of test coverage in the JavaScript side? Almost none. Yeah. It's especially when it's very visual JavaScript. Matt Stauffer Like we're not talking about a lot of data manipulation JavaScript, right? It's very visual. Ah, man. It's rough. So you're finding it pretty decent at those refactors, even when it doesn't have tests to check against? Or are you like, no, we have to do really heavy manual testing afterwards? Jason Beggs Yeah, depending on what it is, I'm definitely doing a lot of testing QA, which I think regardless of what you're working on with AI, like that's a very important thing. With back-end code, it's a lot easier because we do have really good test coverage. So if the test passed, you can be pretty confident that it's working. ([Time 0:21:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/377a899d-9825-4fcb-94a6-cc7f9f43cd55)) - **Ship Desktop Fast Then Add Mobile With Real Devices** - Prioritize desktop first when launching fast, then add responsive support later using real device testing. - Cloud initially skipped mobile to move quickly; Jason later used Expose to share local builds with designers and tested on Android and iPhone for the mobile rollout. Transcript: Jason Beggs Right now, I'm actually working on making the whole app responsive. We were moving so fast in the beginning that we made the hard decision that we're not going to support mobile sizes, basically. So until now, we haven't really dealt with mobile at all. But right now, I do have an actual Android and iPhone sitting here that I'm testing just to make sure at least the first pass that both devices work pretty well. But yeah, day to day, I'm usually in Chrome. If it works in Chrome, it probably works in Safari and Firefox as well. Brave and all that. Yeah. Okay. Matt Stauffer So if you are working on your site locally and you want it to work on your devices, which I assume in the same Wi-Fi, what tool is your preferred tool for getting them onto that device? Jason Beggs Expose. Matt Stauffer Okay. Jason Beggs Yeah. Matt Stauffer Yeah, I love it. Expose is a tool from BeyondCode who's made by Laraville community members. And it's like Ngrok, but it basically shares your local version out to a public endpoint that you can visit somewhere else. So there are some tools that will work only if you're in the same Wi-Fi, but that one would work anywhere, right? You could send that link to anybody on the internet and they can access it. Jason Beggs So the nice thing about that is like Friday, I spun it up and sent the link to our designers and PM that's on the mobile project with me. And they were able to open it up and kind of click around and find some issues and send them to me. ([Time 0:24:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a2b0c0aa-bc8a-4e20-a580-53fd8507d955)) - **Self Taught Woodworker Built His Own House** - Jason taught himself woodworking via YouTube starting in 2020 and progressed from nightstands to building his house and cabinets. - He credits iterative projects for skill growth and built much of his home and office to save money and gain experience. Transcript: Jason Beggs So our house, we pretty much built it. Well, I built a lot of it myself. Yeah. Like, I helped with all the framing, the actually clearing trees, that kind of stuff. Framing, installing windows. I did all the trim. I built cabinets. A lot of different furniture across the house built out this office yeah we did a lot of the work ourselves just to save money and it was fun and that was when i was freelancing so you're A little more flexible yeah i basically worked like 20 hours a week the whole time we were building and worked on the house probably 40 hours a week. Non-stop. Is it done? We still have a lot of projects we want to get done, but it's pretty done. The latest project I did was the stairs. It took me three or four months, I think, total, just off and on, which was the most ambitious project I've done by far. Very difficult with the design that I chose. Okay. And it really pushed my skills to the max. It was above my skill level, so I had to really try hard to get it right. Jason Beggs You had a lot of time on YouTube, too. Yeah, for sure. Jason Beggs Are you self-taught and all that stuff yeah pretty much i think in 2020 i was bored and i don't know how i started watching woodworking youtube videos but i got into watching them and then Bought a table saw and a few tools and ended up building a few small things that ended up leading me to bigger things. Jason Beggs And then somehow I built the house all of a sudden. Didn't you build the house just like a couple of years after that? When did it start? Was it 23, 24? See, we moved in at the end of 23, I think. Okay. But you got into working in 2020 and you started building a house maybe two years later. Yeah. Jason Beggs It's crazy. Okay. Matt Stauffer And that's what I'm saying. I'm like, that's the type of person you are. That's why you get in a call with someone and they're like, yeah, I want that guy to work with me. I guess so. Jason Beggs It's kind of interesting though, like with all the different projects in the house like the furniture and stuff you can like see my skill level progress throughout yeah the first things I built were was like a night a nightstand and it was all right like for like a first project goes pretty good but then i like built a copy of it and that one's nicer than the first one yeah And then i built a bed like a platform bed with drawers in the same kind of style. That was nicer than the nightstand. And then for the house, the kitchen cabinets are quite a bit nicer than that. ([Time 0:27:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/df752a66-3907-4f4a-9ec3-44a58c344444))