Here is the origin story of Laravelista, and how I closed that chapter of my life with this book.
This book documents my two-year journey teaching others to build websites and web applications with Laravel.
Laravelista was the name of the blog on which I wrote tutorials related to the Laravel framework, web application development, testing and other things related to Laravel.
After a year the blog had over a thousand unique monthly visitors, and that figure increased from month to month. After seeing that there is a growing market for Laravel tutorials, I decided to create a business which would publish tutorials and courses, for a monthly or annual subscription. Each tutorial would come with the source code, and I would also offer support via comments on tutorials.
I've made a web application for writing tutorials, posting tutorials, managing subscriptions and comments. In order to be able to charge people subscription over the website I have opened a personal company.
I called my company Laravelista as was the name of the blog. During the first year, I wrote a couple of hit tutorials. One of them was on the topic of JWT Authentication and the Lumen framework. Since I was one of the first, if not the first one who managed to implement Lumen with JWT authentication and write a tutorial about it, a lot of people contacted me about it. This resulted in my second release of this tutorial after a few months, with an even simpler implementation method.
In the same period I made few open-source packages for Laravel that were positively received by the Laravel community.
I wrote a Codeship article in which I showed how to make a Laravel application, write tests for it, set up a continuous integration with the Codeship service, and make an automatic deployment on the Heroku application hosting platform. Because of these tutorials and open-source packages I have begun to receive offers from other developers to implement some of my packages in their application or to come to work for them as a freelancer. Initially, I declined such jobs because I was focused on writing tutorials, maintaining and upgrading Laravelista web application. After some time of doing this, I found myself in the situation that I no longer enjoyed writing tutorials and it was not bringing me the satisfaction that I had when I started.
To wrap this chapter of my life, I decided to write a book A Collection of Laravel Tutorials, which I independently published on Leanpub.
In it I have listed, processed and categorized all of my tutorials from the moment of starting my company up to the moment of shutting down my web application. The book can be purchased on Leanpub along with an additional companion book which contains all articles that I have posted since the beginning of the Laravelista blog.
I sent a free copy of the book to all my active subscribers.
Thank you everybody for the support, it means a lot to me.
Best regards,
Mario Bašić