Back in May of 2023, Marty Friedel and I were chatting in the Blue Ridge Mountains at our very first Flat Camp and he mentioned he was considering submitting a Statamic talk to Laracon AU. I encouraged him of course (knowing he would crush it), and he did end up submitting a talk. It ended up not being a Statamic talk, but rather something more personal, something "harder" than a technical talk. Something better, honestly. His talk was called The Invisible Developer, it was accepted, and I'm not sugarcoating anything here — it was incredible. I highly recommend watching it.

Well, Marty's back at Laracon in Brisbane this November, and this time he's doing that Statamic talk and going full technical with one called High Performance Statamic. Though between you and me, his first talk has the potential to change more lives than the latter. But I digress.

In case you don't know Marty

Marty runs the dev side (as a self-proclaimed "Head Code Monkey") at Mity Digital in Adelaide, Australia. He's been building for the web for twenty-five years and is a Certified Statamic Partner, an addon maker, and a Laravel developer through and through. He also teaches BodyPump to rooms full of sweaty strangers on the weekend and is, by his own admission, rarely far from a LEGO project. Oh, and he has a really cool cat.

But aside from the rap sheet, he's also one of the calmest, most generous people in this whole community, which makes him a pretty great person to learn this stuff from. When Marty explains something, you actually walk away getting it. He somehow balances "no fluff" with "this talk makes me feel good". If you want to know what I mean, check out another of his talks – Design to Statamic 5 in 40 minutes from PHP Adelaide, or Building Maintainable Websites with Statamic on the Laravel Worldwide Meetup livestream.

The Laracon AU Talk

Marty's talk at Laracon AU will detail the journey of taking a decade-old site with 50k messy old HTML content pages and bringing it into Statamic and Bard with continued daily content updates. Oh, and making the whole thing fast. Fast fast.

He'll dig into Livewire, Eloquent, events, queues, backups, static caching, asset management, and the deployment workflows. All in 40 minutes. If it was anyone else, I wouldn't be sure it could be squeezed into the timeslot. I don't think even I could do it. But Marty can.

So if you're in Australia or are able to travel — grab a ticket, find Marty, tell him Jack sent you. And look for our logo (we're sponsoring this year!). Or if you're like me and 10,000 miles is just a couple miles too many, check out the livestream or posted videos (however they're doing it this year) and see what we can learn together.