A Tale of Love, Tears, and Debugging at 2AM
or, My Life as an Andrew Lloyd Webber Musical
Let’s start this out with two caveats;
I am a self taught programmer.
I have made a good living programming despite point one.
So, this all starts with a funny little thing that happens when you start building in Laravel.
At first, you’re the princess who’s found the enchanted forest of Otwell: elegant syntax, easy-to-use MVC, magical Eloquent relationships (to borrow an Apple parlance) that 'just work’.
It’s literally sunshine and rainbows and php artisan
But…
But then… somewhere in between your fifteenth migration rollback and an Alpine.js meltdown, you realize the truth;
It’s not an enchanted forest, it’s the Hunger Games.
Shocking. Brutal. Unfair?
No, because even when Laravel hurts me, I keep coming back. Under all the frustrations and Stack Overflow tabs lies a framework that’s still the best thing that’s happened to;
My codebase.
My skills.
And, to be honest, PHP itself.
If this were an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, I would start out as a headstrong WordPress kid thinking he knew the world, and I would transform into a gremlin screaming at foreign key constraints. Even while loving every minute of it.
So, Mr. Webber, on with the musical;
Act 1: The Honeymoon Phase
When I first installed Laravel, it felt like I’d been handed the keys to Taylor’s Lamborghini.
Routing was built in, you could serve a dev server from inside the code base, the authentication scaffolded out with a single command, Laracon was an awesome conference. I was like a wizard in that aforementioned magical forest.
To say the least, I was flying. Flying in the proverbial Lamborghini of PHP frameworks. I was going to make the cleanest API backend, and I was going to build it all in a weekend!
Cue the “This is fine” dog meme…
Act 2: Foreign Invaders (aka Foreign Keys)
The first cracks start to appear, and our protagonist starts to hunch just a little… just a bit gremlin like…
I had a grand idea, break addresses into;
States table
Countries table
Address table, referencing both (a polymorphic relationship for any other model).
Dead simple, right?
Wrong.
Dead on arrival.
SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violationI felt like the guys from Office Space.
Me: “Integrity constraint violation, what the **** does that mean!?”
I’d properly used foreignId()→constrained() — they were supposed to be MAGIC!
Fine, I’ll run php artisan migrate again, maybe I just need to turn it off and turn it back on again (side note: that IT trick doesn’t work in programming).
SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violationMe: “What constraint? They’re magic constraints. I am constraint-free. I AM A CONSTRAINT-FREE ZONE.”
Laravel: “lol nope.” (This is where in the musical, Laravel becomes a character that torments me)
What followed was three hours of rolling back migrations, reordering seeders, and asking myself deep philosophical questions like:
Why do circular dependencies exist?
Am I accidentally recreating the plot of Inception in my database?
Should I switch careers and become a barista like my wife?
(Spoiler: I fixed it by seeding states and countries first. And I didn’t become a barista.)
Act 3: Logic from the Depths of Mordor-Math
In the application I was building, specifically for the musical, it included payroll calculations. So it was time to figure out how to track overtime.
Thunderclash! And maybe a musical number about union rules, holiday pay, and let’s say minimum call-in hours, just to reopen old wounds.
How hard could overtime be? If you work more than a Forty (lol), you get overtime.
This is where the Witch King of Syntax unleashes his black riders of math.
And I love math. I’m good at math.
But apparently I’m bad at writing logic, because I end up with these travesties;
if ($this->location->minimumCallIn && $workedHours < $this->payrule->minimumCallIn) {
// Just pay them minimum call-in
}Except the final code is fifty lines longer and filled with proprietary code (IYKYK), but it was capped off with my crowning achievement… a commit note saying simply;
“Don’t touch this unless you enjoy pain.”
It’s obviously in jest.
But seriously, once you get something working, breaking it again can be heartbreaking.
At one point, I made a tiny tweak to handle holiday pay and accidentally triggered double overtime on Thanksgiving. My test employee made $4,200 in one day.
Good for them!
Bad for me.
Here is where I get my sword of PEST. For those who don’t know, PEST is a testing framework written by Nuno Maduro (who I am looking forward to seeing at Laracon this year), a Laravel Core member.
PEST writes its test kinda like Buffalo Bill, “it has a welcome page, or it gets the hose again…”
(This is a sample from the PEST homepage)
it(‘has a welcome page’, function() {
$response = $this->get('/');
expect($response->status())->toBe(200);
});Now, when I do a 2am code fest instead of sleeping, I’ll know instantly if I broke my code, and I don’t have to leave threats in my GitHub repo to future me.
Cue the heroic fight against the orcs of broken code!
Act 4: Tailwind Tailspin
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves! We’re not getting rescued by eagles, we’re getting bounced.
Let’s talk about frontend baby, let’s talk about you and me.
Tailwind and Alpine (and Livewire for that matter) were supposed to by my lightweight buddy for interactivity. But somehow, they just kept making me more bald, and I’m already bald.
To start with, I couldn’t (still can’t actually) get Tailwind to build using npx, constant errors. It works fine when I let Laravel do the heavy lifting with installing — but part of learning and getting better is understanding how tools work.
Then, coming from the old days of WordPress, even early Bootstrap, and vanilla CSS, I constantly find nothing but frustration with Tailwind layout and alignment when using flex containers.
I usually get it working right, but it’s never a one-and-done kind of code.
Which leaves me, the gremlin shaped programmer, reaching up at the eagle that had dropped me screaming;
Me: “Why!?”
Alpine.js (the eagle): “¯\_(ツ)_/¯“
Every fix created two more bugs, like I was coding Hydra. And yet — I kept at it, because Tailwind + Alpine is still one of the fastest ways to build UI’s. As I powered through, and I learned more, I was able to master my issues.
This is the point where my gremlin grows wings? I guess?
Act 5: The Magic Returns to Laravel Land
Here’s the thing: Laravel didn’t betray me.
It was me.
I didn’t understand relationships and migrations well enough, I wasn’t writing tests, I clung to old ideals on how to style UI.
But every bug taught me something.
Every failed test made my app stronger.
Every misplaced <div> turned into an, “Ohhhh. That’s why.”
These are just three small examples, three middle acts of the musical, that highlight recent examples in my 9 years programming Laravel and 25+ years programming PHP.
In the end, Laravel didn’t just give me a framework. It gave me confidence, battle scars, and the ability to laugh at my own code later.
To end the musical, my warped and distorted gremlin spreads its wings, lifting the sword of PEST over his head. And a closing number includes something about cows, because I grew up in Wisconsin.
Lessons Learned
Try to plan out your application database first, so you build it in the right order. Planning helps avoid a three hour Stack Overflow search that ends in a head smack.
Write tests early, you will thank yourself later.
Be willing to lean into an learn new ways of doing things.
Take breaks. Even Laravel can’t save you from decision fatigue.
Laravel is magic. But even magic takes practice.
Final Thoughts
If you ever felt like a framework hates you: it doesn’t.
You’re just learning to speak its language, and when you do… that’s when you learn to make magic.
