James Brooks - Forging Forge - Laracon AU 2025

James Brooks shares how the Laravel team rebuilt Forge from the ground up to modernise its architecture, improve performance and create a more cohesive developer experience. He walks through the redesign decisions, technical challenges and lessons learned while maintaining a production platform used across the Laravel community. 📚 ## Chapters 01:34 High level overview of what Forge is and its origins in 2014 02:05 How Forge influenced Laravel’s growth 03:30 Evolution of Forge and the increasing complexity created by 10 years of features and decisions 04:20 Circles, shared access and why the legacy permission model became confusing and limiting 05:38 How the Accel investment enabled resourcing for Cloud, Nightwatch and a dedicated Forge team 06:02 Differences between Laravel Forge and Laravel Cloud, clarifying their respective roles 07:39 Why the old Forge UI and architecture had hit their limits and could not support future growth 08:09 Technical debt, legacy code and how you can see the evolution of Laravel reflected in Forge 09:03 UX limitations, navigation sprawl and the need for a more coherent interface 10:00 Architecture redesign, including rewriting the back end to support organisations and pagination 12:00 How the team approached shipping a completely new backend without breaking existing production users 17:27 Large customers with hundreds of servers made pagination, search and better routing essential 20:00 Rewriting Forge instead of versioning it, and how they maintained compatibility 26:41 Rapid hiring, cross training engineers and preparing the team for the redesigned Forge architecture 27:07 Laravel VPS idea as a way to dramatically improve onboarding friction and provisioning speed 27:41 Server provisioning pain points, slow MySQL install and how they initially shaved minutes off 28:36 Taylor’s “two minutes or bust” 32:46 Foundational improvements position Forge for another decade of growth https://x.com/jbrooksuk https://bsky.app/profile/jbrooks.uk https://laracon.au