From Standup to DevRel: How Josh Cirre Found Laravel  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Laravel Podcast]] - Full Title: From Standup to DevRel: How Josh Cirre Found Laravel - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/872c24fb-4085-49ae-9da9-950f639447bb ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **From Improv to Laravel DevRel** - Josh Cirre's path included improv, acting, and music before diving deeply into Laravel. - Facing layoffs, he launched a YouTube channel focusing on Laravel, leveraging his creative background. Transcript: Josh Cirre Yeah, it really is a crazy story, even for my own standards. I feel like I have a lot of stories and my wife will get bored of them most of the time where it's like, where it's like, Hey, you know, I have this random story of, I don't know, some guy paying Me $200 at a park in Chicago to slap him in the face. You know, there's things like that, that just sounds like a good story. Matt Stauffer Yeah. Josh Cirre Just randomly happened to me in a lot of ways. But I would put this how I fell into the community of Laravel and then also like being working for Laravel as one of the top. Oh, I never expected that in a million years kind of thing. Yeah, it really starts with my desire for what I wanted to do in development in that world itself. Because I, as a little bit of a quick backstory, I had a bunch of different hands in a bunch of different areas growing up, especially like in college, post-college, where I was like, Hey, I'm just going to try a bunch of different things and see where they fall. A lot of it came through music, um, acting. And then really I wanted to be in SNL on Saturday night live. And so when I lived in Chicago for about four years, I took, um, classes from second city, which is like this improv school that a lot of the great Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, they Kind of made their way up through there in Chicago and then kind of like transitioned into Saturday Night Live. So I was like, I'm just going to do that. That was my my dream for the longest time. And so on the side, I learned a lot more of tech. Within high school, within college, mostly landing pages, you know, bands that I knew that wanted a WordPress site put up for them kind of thing. I never coded really. It was more of just, I know how to tweak things, look something up, modify it, you know? Yeah, totally. And so I didn't really code. I did buy some like C++ coding books and I'd got as far as like, hello world, that kind of thing. Cause I was like, I'm going to be a game developer and build the next battlefield too. But that's a whole nother story. Uh, and so I, when I transitioned kind of back into tech, I knew two things. I knew I wanted to not give up my creative side in the sense that I really, I still do enjoy music. I still play music, but I also just like, you know, acting. I like writing. I like that, you know, artistic cinematic side, if you will. And so I knew that eventually I would get into something like that. And I didn't know if that world collided within tech. And so a lot of the, the second thing I knew I wanted to do was work remotely because my mind just worked better when I wasn't having to collaborate with people until I needed to collaborate With people. And the few office jobs I had were very tough for me as an individual, because I didn't feel like I could get the deep work I needed to get done until I was home. And then I would just do extra work. Yeah. And so the first couple of jobs that I had were more in the realm of customer support, technical support, where I could learn how to code on the side, even more depth, a lot of internal tooling That we could build, a lot of automations that I could learn that process of building. And then on the side, it was always like, hey, I could figure out how to build a SaaS. I could figure out how to build this tool that I need, or, you know, one of my friends has an idea. Maybe I can try to figure that out. And so it was a lot of that kind of process really up until about 2023 was when I got laid off. I had just, we had just had our second kid. Um, I got laid off from the company that I was working at. Perfect timing. I know. It's always perfect timing. That was something. And I got laid off, and I was in the sales engineering space. And along this time, I had found that I wanted to be, this new world was coming up in the 2018, 1920 of this DevRel role where it's like, hey, a lot of the people I was following who were writing Blogs, who were on Twitter, who were on LinkedIn, were like, they used to be these theater people just like me. But now they're tech people and theater people who are making videos, you know, going on podcasts, going, talking on live streams, you know, that kind of thing. I was like, that, that sounds like the perfect fit. And so every role that I was in up until I got laid off, I kind of like made it an honorary dev role as best as I could. There was never dev in those companies, but I was like, I'm going to spend an extra six to 10 hours a week outside of my actual work and just pretend if this was a dev role, what would I be doing? So I made videos. I talked about it. I talked about what I was learning, that kind of thing. And then when I got laid off, I was like, hey, I don't really know what to do because I don't have the experience to jump into a dev role. But I don't want to continue with sales engineering. And I don't want to, you know, do a 180 and just go into development because I don't think that would fit really well with me, or I would pretend it was a dev role role anyways. And so I did the thing that every smart, person would do. And I spent a bunch of money on making, spent a bunch of money and time on making a YouTube channel in a lot of ways. I told my wife, I was like, I really think that this is going to, you know, I think I could do this. I think I could, if not make it to a full-time thing, I think it could lead to a full-time thing. And she was very supportive because like, I was like spending all day applying to jobs and like doing some kind of contract work. And then at night I would just, you know, pretend I was a full-time YouTuber. And the thing that I had kind of learned picked up was in all of these side projects and even kind of like even these like internal tools that I was building, I was like, hey, every single Night I want to try to learn something. And so I would find the frameworks, the libraries, the programming languages that I didn't know really well. And I was just someone who just knew JavaScript. I knew the backend as a service type stuff, like Firebase, Firebase, Superbase. And I dabbled with like MongoDB within Meteor. That was kind of like my one full stack thing that I used. It's still around, by the way, which is interesting. I haven't touched it, but it's still around. And so every night I would try like, okay, if I was to build a, the, my next SAS, what would this look like? And usually I always got stuck on the authentication piece. I don't know why for me, it was just, I hated doing it. And it took me longer than the actual crud piece ([Time 0:03:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d119d0ff-69c5-459b-b596-56c8288c4f3d)) - **Improv Enhances Video Authenticity** - Use minimal scripting and rely on an outline to maintain authenticity and spontaneity in video content. - Embrace multiple takes to capture raw, relatable, and heartfelt communication. Transcript: Josh Cirre Improv to music to even sales engineer stuff has really led to my videos getting better. And I think the biggest thing and what I would kind of encourage a lot of people to do is like if I looked at my first video and you could probably look at it too, like my first video on my channel Or even the first video within the Laravel official channel to now, there's been improvement, at least in my mind. And I think a lot of that's just from consistency. But then the second aspect is I think the sales engineering piece kind of gave me the tools of how can I formulate, especially when it comes to like the intro or just you're thinking of An overall key theme of the video that you want to keep in mind throughout. But as you're talking, as in the intro of the video, you want to tell people, why do you care about this particular 20 minutes? Why do you care about this particular eight minutes? And so usually I don't write much of anything for every single video. Usually the title or the topic is the only thing that I'm keeping in mind. And so if it's something like, what is taking an example from a video that I made on the Laravel official channel. That's what is live wire vault. And so in my mind, a lot of the, it kind of goes into, okay, I'm on Twitter a lot and I could say that's probably part of my job as well, but I'm on Twitter a lot. And so I'm seeing that people don't like vault, but it's not because they don't like it being in one file. Usually it's like, they don't like that it feels different than Livewire or it feels like there's no tooling around it. And so all their tests don't work in this particular way. And so as I'm doing that video, as I'm doing that intro, I'm thinking about the people who might be watching or the people who are consuming this. And so that improv piece probably comes in as well as that sales engineering piece. And I think probably the musical piece of like, okay, as we're going through this, we want to keep on key, if you will, like there's, there's different rhythms that we could go throughout This video about the same at the end of the day, every single piece of value that should be taken out of that video is, hey, this is not different from what you might be using if you are using Live wire. But if you haven't used live wire, here's why it might be easier than traditional live wire for you. And so I think I love that usually to kind of answer your question around about why I don't script anything. ([Time 0:20:17](https://share.snipd.com/snip/511c3966-7a50-4908-b918-5f4805bba744)) - **Musicians and Developers Overlap** - There is a large overlap between musicians and developers, reflecting shared creativity and rhythm understanding. - Josh is working on a talk exploring how music informs coding and developer creativity. Transcript: Josh Cirre Yeah. And it's funny because that is a working talk title. I've had, I haven't gotten the chance to give this at any conference. I still apply with it every now and then for some conferences, but if you were to take, especially in the Laravel world, outside the Laravel world, I think it's still a large majority Of people, but the, the people who have some sort of musical background as developers is there's a huge overlap there. And I have this kind of working talk called music as code where like a lot of what we are like writing or just like the process of development and just like the process of like your creativity In general kind of leads into why a lot of musicians or developers were musicians in a lot of ways. It's funny how many people had, you know, bands or still play nowadays. It's incredible kind of overlap in my mind in a lot of ways. ([Time 0:24:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/509fe6dc-b895-44ca-afff-fbf359827625)) - **Bootcamp Simplifies Learning Path** - The Laravel Bootcamp relaunch focuses on simple core concepts before introducing frameworks like Inertia or Livewire. - This modular approach addresses beginner confusion and builds foundational Laravel understanding step-by-step. Transcript: Josh Cirre So this is something that I have kind of had on the back of my mind since I started, but it wasn't really until, you know, until Chris came on and we kind of had this overall sense of, okay, What is what or what should be the main focus of stuff? Is it specifically just for YouTube content is specifically for, you know, within the community and open source and templates and projects and stuff like that? What should the overall goal of DevRel be and where does that live in a lot of sense? So i was always a fan and still am a fan of like the the boot camp for laravel that used to live at bootcamp.laravail it's currently not live mostly because we had this uh revamped version Kind of in the pipeline but also because it used breeze instead of like the new starter kits the process of updating it would have been the same as what we're working on now. And so the thought in my mind is like, there should always be a starting point for people who are new to Laravel. Usually, and I think our documentation is fantastic. It's built that way. I think we've even in past year have improved things of how you install PHP and Composer and Laravel with a single command on the Laravel docs, which is great, but there's still that process Of, okay, now if I want to, even if I'm familiar with web development or routing and requests and templating and all that, there's still, a what if or where do I go next question for a lot Of new to Laravel people or just people who are Laravel curious. And so because this has been part of my journey where I didn't know MVC or I didn't know PHP at all, and I just kind of like learned as I went, the revamped bootcamp was something that was Near and dear to my mind and something that I've been working on, especially the past month, but really in the last couple of weeks. So we're basically relaunching the bootcamp as a getting started with Laravel and that we're going to still do an ode to the original chirper application. And so it's still going to be built with Chirper. I think the only key differences that we would note is a lot of feedback that we got from people who had taken it, as well as people who we asked of when you did the bootcamp, what was the first Thing that came to mind is it's a lot. It's really hard, especially if you're getting started with Laravel, to know where to start when it comes to the first step of, okay, we have starter kits. If you know React, you know Vue, that's great. But there's still, okay, how does that fit in? Where does inertia come into play? Matt Stauffer And you have like 300 files in there. Even when you get the file, you're like, which of the 300 files do I open? I don't know. Josh Cirre I think I know. And even, you know, it was, I think, the thing I really like about being a DevRel, and I think, you know, all of us on the team, Chris Christophe and Lira, like, we all feel this way in a lot Of senses. Like, we watch streams, like when Taylor was on Primogen's stream with Tiege. Like, these are two developers, both Tiege and Prime. Tiege had also worked in Laravel a little bit or done a personal project with him. Prime is not a dumb developer. He's a very smart developer. He's a very smart guy. Yeah, incredibly smart guy. And so the fact that, and of course, like his brain's kind of all over the place too at the same time. But when stuff like that is also a hard struggle to say, okay, where, where would I go for this? I have an idea. And most of the time that guess is probably correct. But what, what is the absolute basics of what I need to know that then brings you into, okay, now let's enhance that with live wire or now let's add inertia with react and view. And I think the old bootcamp kind of forced you to, again, I love the old bootcamp. I think the old bootcamp forced you because of breeze, you kind of had to choose which one you're going to do before you even saw anything. Do what you're doing. Yeah. And that's tough. Especially when we don't, I don't think there should be a starter kit that is just blade. And then you add on to it in a lot of ways, like Taylor's kind of talked about that as well. And so the boot camp, which is effectively the first part of a new initiative put on by the DevRel team, we called Laravel Learn to be able to have these micro courses and a place for a lot Of this more in-depth written content and in-depth videos to live, to kind of teach the basics of Laravel in that sense. It's not meant to replace LaraCast. It's not meant to replace our YouTube channel, but it is meant to be a, okay, if I'm browsing Laravel's sites, what is the first thing I need to get up and running? And so this new bootcamp is just played. It's mostly like, what is a web request? How do we do a route? How do we do a form? And while not all of that is probably transferable into inertia and live wire and things like that, I think it is, it sets the groundwork for most people to feel why Laravel is so powerful Because it gives even within forms and uh you know like html requests and controllers you still get the the feeling of oh this has everything even if we don't touch events just yet or even If we don't touch notifications and that kind of thing that's ([Time 0:25:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b2e79ac2-1838-46c7-99b0-edc86554453f)) - **Foundational Learning Despite Preferences** - Starting Laravel teaching with Blade and controllers creates foundational understanding despite personal preferences. - This staged learning prepares developers to better tackle more complex frontend stacks later. Transcript: Josh Cirre Yeah, I think for me specifically, and I think like this is also like a great point of having to, like you said, kind of take those extra things. And even if I might not agree on my personal opinions on that, like it's having that overall sense of, okay, well, what is the majority best good for the community and good for new learners As well? Because I personally probably wouldn't start with blade in the sense that I would, I don't like controllers. That's just something that's never worked with my brain. But I also know that if I'm writing inertia, I have to use controllers. And so it's this kind of like this give and take of, yeah, if we are going to teach new people who are into Laravel before they even touch the, the awesome magic of inertia, like you almost Have to start. And, and this is probably like my own impressive preference too. Like I like starting with like the front end and then moving into the backend. Starter kit or not starting with this, you know, welcome to the bootcamp learning, learning Laravel bootcamp. We want to focus on here's what Laravel provides. Now you can go and do with it. Build out your front end. Now you can go and build out these notifications. And so the goal of it as a whole, like this initial bootcamp piece is yes, meant to be that starting point of getting started and, and seeing the magic of Laravel. ([Time 0:33:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4bcd409e-c014-4cba-b62a-c2ad650b1bfd)) - **The $200 Slap in Chicago** - Josh once was paid $200 by a stranger in Millennium Park to slap him in the face as proof for a court case. - The crowd cheered him on, making it a memorable Chicago moment blending oddness and community. Transcript: Josh Cirre Going on there? Yeah, it's, it's a wild story. I was, I was in college. I think I was just out of college at the time. So this was when I was kind of trying to make my dues within um second city and and everything like that and this uh there's millennium park in chicago which is kind of like the biggest park There's if you've ever seen the bean which is like the big metal bean that lives in the center of millennium park sculpture yeah but yeah it's a lot of people hang out and in the summer it's A really nice area and so this guy came up to me he was kind of frantic at first. And he said like, Hey, like I'll give you $200. Um, you slap me on the face, like right here as hard as you can. And I thought I was like either a YouTuber joke prank, like, you know, that kind of thing. Or I don't know, my mind first went to undercover cop. Like I, if I, yeah, you're like, am I getting arrested? Like, I can't do this, but he ended up showing me these papers of how he was going to court. And like, he was telling me like this whole backstory of how his significant other was, you know, physically abusing him and all this thing. But he was like, I don't have any evidence. And so like, if you do this, then like, I could, you know, I could be a part of this. And I'm not proud of it but it's like i'm saying i'm not saying i turned down 200 i turned down 200 but i'm not like i don't think it's my moral like i can tell if he was telling the truth or or Lying or maybe he didn't even have court maybe that was just you know you just maybe he just really likes getting slapped in the face that's worth two dollars for exactly so i'm not i'm Not gonna turn it down and so i i follow i i asked the questions just to make sure i wasn't you know going to be held legally responsible for anything whether he was a cop or anything else But yeah yeah um that was surprisingly one of the first times i think only times that someone has asked me to hit them for money. Matt Stauffer Yeah. For money is really because like that's that's happened occasionally, but never for money. Josh Cirre And the funny thing was, he said he said he had asked like four other people and everyone said no. So I was like, well, I can't leave you hanging. Like it was further. Matt Stauffer You're like, he's going to get slapped somehow. Right. So might as well be me. Josh Cirre I was like, I might like, I'm not going to do it too hard. I actually had to do it twice. Cause he, uh, the first time it wasn't hard enough. Matt Stauffer Yeah. So did anybody stop and like stare at you after the first time he had made like a pretty big scene. Josh Cirre So like, it was more people like cheering me on. So this was like classic Chicago at this point where like, yeah, do it, dude. Like there's just people I don't even know. Like I was not there. I was not there by myself. So funny. ([Time 0:38:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b39fdd5f-fa0d-494b-a058-6e19431da166))