Last week, Laracon EU 2026 took place in Amsterdam, and we’re finally coming down from the conference high (or rather recharged our depleted social batteries) to share our experience with you, dear reader. From March 2–3, 2026, over a thousand Laravel (and Statamic) developers met at the Passenger Terminal Amsterdam. Not to board a cruise ship but to learn and spend time together IRL. The venue, perched on the River IJ, is a modern and versatile space built for big ideas. The perfect backdrop for two days of talks and camaraderie.

While I, Josh, had a rather short train journey from Germany, both Duncan and Erin arrived by plane. Erin even crossed the pond and came over from Vancouver, Canada! Some jet lag, stroopwafels (Dutch waffle), and a healthy dose of excitement set the tone for the week. The three of us (and many more) stayed at the Movenpick hotel right next to the venue, which made things much easier.

Kicking things off with our Statamic meetup

We decided to make the most of our time in the Netherlands by gathering the Statamic community the evening before the conference. So on March 1st, we hosted a Statamic meetup at Bar Botanique in the east of Amsterdam, known as the "green oasis". It was actually the exact same place we did our meetup two years ago. The place, once a primary school gymnasium and now a bar/café with a mezzanine and lush plants, served as our jungle‑themed living room.

More than 30 of you showed up! We chatted over drinks and food, brought some sweet Statamic stickers for you, and talked about Statamic and life. Every single one of you who attended helped make this gathering feel special, so Thank You!

Conference Day 1

Early Monday morning, registration took place and Nuno Maduro took the stage as MC to welcome everyone and kick off conference.

Here are some of the highlights from the first day:

• Write better abstractions – Dan Harrin as the first speaker of the conference, walked us through lessons learned from designing an import system which was pretty neat.
• Handling the unhappy path – Ryan Chandler reminded everyone that most of our code deals with errors and edge cases. He shared strategies to surface and embrace these "sad paths" early to become happy again.
• One billion rows with Laravel – Database GOAT Tobias Petry explained indexing and sharding techniques that let Laravel query huge datasets. Wild stuff, enjoyed this one a lot, personally.
• Unblocking your users with AI – Peter Suhm from Tailwind Labs shared some insights into where AI fits into product workflows. His point of AI assistance in your product surfacing at just the right moment to help, not to take over your product, actually makes sense.

Kind of a tradition by now, the day closed with the keynote from Taylor Otwell, creator of Laravel.

Taylor’s talk was pretty packed with updates regarding the Laravel core and framework itself (Laravel 13 drops March 17th) as well as updates related to the general Laravel product ecosystem and a wild demo using AI.

Laravel 13 will include some pretty neat things, like added PHP attributes across 15+ locations, a Reverb database driver (no need for Redis), built‑in passkey authentication, and a stable Laravel AI SDK. Official starter kits will gain proper team support as well. Those are just some of the coming updates.

The real showstopper was his live AI demo though. Taylor deliberately introduced a bug into a demo app. Nightwatch (Laravel's monitoring solution) caught the error. He then went on to ask his AI agent via voice prompt to fix it and the agent used Nightwatch’s API to analyze and suggest a fix, spun up a disposable Laravel Cloud instance, created a pull request and asked for approval. Watching the bug getting fixed and deployed by AI already felt pretty cool. When his personal AI assistant called him live on stage to confirm merging the PR though, that was just wild. I was both impressed and laughing at the same time.

As the sun set, we enjoyed a little team dinner and headed for the Laracon After Dark party, which was on the other side of the river IJ. That meant we actually had to take a ferry. Cool thing is that it's part of Amsterdam's overall public transport system, takes less than 5 minutes, and is even free!

Conference Day 2

The second day of the conference began with a talk by Joe Tannenbaum titled "State of the Frontend" in which he also talked about Inertia 3 launching soon. That's interesting for us since Statamic 6 now runs on Vue 3 and Inertia.js.

• Pete Heslop, founder of our certified Partner agency Steadfast Collective, drew on real‑world stories from hospitals, restaurants, and airports to show how good UX can help projects thrive. He argued that we should treat users like restaurant guests, reduce friction like airlines, and plan for mistakes like surgeons.
• John Drexler took the stage that day and challenged us to stop living in hypothetical diagrams and ship to production sooner. Spend less time in the mind palace.
• Later that day, John's colleague from Thunk, Daniel Coulbourne, shared the scars of migrating massive data sets in a very entertaining talk. Always like to listen to him.

Even though the individual videos of the talks are not up yet, you can watch the entire stream for day 1 and 2 over on Laracon EU's YouTube channel. The individual videos should hopefully be up soon 🤞.

What’s next?

As always with Laracons, Laracon EU 2026 was more than a conference. It's not just about the talks, it's about spending time with like-minded people and sharing an experience as well as celebrating both the Laravel and Statamic community.

The conference left us inspired and sparked some new ideas for what we can do with Statamic (not that we have enough ideas already). Laravel 13 support for Statamic is just waiting to be merged once v13 officially gets released later this month. And above all, our community meetup and talking to you all at the conference reminded us how much we love connecting with you all face‑to‑face. Stay tuned for updates on Flat Camp #3 and we hope to see some of you at Laracon US in Boston, July 28-29!

From the canals (Grachten in Dutch) of Amsterdam to the talks inside the Passenger Terminal, Duncan, Erin, and I had an amazing time at Laracon this year and are really proud of this community. Until next time, tot ziens (goodbye in Dutch)!