This blog post is Human-Centered Content: Written by humans for humans.

Continuing on with our favorite projects this year, I swung by our Curator team to hit up Curator Engineer Kate An and find out what her favorite project was this year. To my surprise, her answer was less a project in the traditional sense, and more of the precursor to many projects yet to come: Time spent with her team at Laracon 2024 in Dallas.

Just like the previous entry in the series, this post is in an interview style format, with Kate’s answers clearly noted.

The Conference

So, what was Laracon 2024? According to their website, Laracon was “[t]he flagship Laravel event of the year and the largest PHP conference in the United States…” For those uninitiated, Laravel is “a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax,” providing accessible, robust web app development.

Any why was Kate there?

“It was my first time going to a convention about Laravel and all things Laravel related.

I wasn’t super familiar [with Laravel] because I didn’t use it on the daily. We use it a lot of a lot of our back end features, which is not my specialty. But I’m slowly getting into PHP related things and the front end part of Laravel. [The conference] was a professional growth opportunity for the team to see they were all about — they’re getting pretty big now, even though they said before they started as a small community. Now, it’s grown really large and everyone needs it. We also went to check out different vendors. Overall, it was more like a learning opportunity for the team, plus a way to socialize and see each other, since we’re located all over the place.”

And how did she like it?

“I thought it was super fun! I was really surprised how nice the community was and how welcoming everybody was.

I also didn’t expect to see many women there, but I saw a couple of them, so I’m really excited about that. I was like, “Oh, more women developers! That’s awesome.” Some were freelance and some were corporate. And, some of the speakers [were women] were too.”

Thought it was undoubtedly a good time for the team, they didn’t walk away empty handed. Without divulging the exact details of every program that Curator uses, according to Kate, the conference speakers and vendors inspired several initiatives for the team that may find their way into your Curator instance down the line.

“I’d say that it facilitated a lot of new ideas, which then will turn into different developments, different features or just a lot of help on technical tools that will help us in our daily work as well.

There was a lot of cool, little things — a lot of free things that we took away from [the conference], and a lot of new conversations were initiated because of it. Like, ‘How is Curator gonna look in the future?’ or, ‘Which direction we should go in?’ It helped facilitate a lot of that conversation and inspire us to to come up with new ideas and just have deeper conversations about what the future looks like for Curator.”

Why Her Favorite?

The question naturally follows: Why was this Kate’s favorite project of the year? A conference is a nice break from the day to day of work, but it may not spring to mind as everyone’s first choice of their favorite project of the year. Well, the answer is pretty simple, actually:

“While the conference was the primary focus, it was nice to spend little moments with everybody, catching up our lives, and that’s when I really feel that we’re getting closer as the team.

Since I’m remote, it’s a bit hard to catch up — you kinda tend to focus on just the work stuff, and it can be very straight cut. There might not be as many opportunities to talk about other stuff. Just being together in person was really fun.”

Being fully remote, as nearly everyone working from 2020 on can attest, can be isolating, no doubt. A conference can be more than just a break from the mundane — it can be a chance to truly reconnect with colleagues that you may work with every day, but rarely see face to face.

Above: The Curator team at Laracon 2024.

While she was reconnecting with the team, what were some of Kate’s favorite moments from the convention trip?

“Aside from how informative the convention was, I also remember they had this really good honey ice cream down the street from the convention. Just walking around with the team after getting that and vibing downtown was great.

And, also, it was my first time going to Texas. So, it was pretty hot in the summer. It’s not gonna lie. The first night, we had ramen, which I thought was really funny. I was like, ‘Why are we eating ramen in the middle of the summer in Texas?’

So, just little moments like that where I get to catch up with the team and talk about things outside of work too.”

And while it’s clear that she loves hanging with her team on a personal level, what does Kate love most about her team professionally?

“I think InterWorks, and Curator especially, since that’s what I’m most familiar with, is very open minded. I think we are really ready to take in new technologies and new software and new tools to help us, like, however we need.

And that was really cool to see because we’re not limited or restricted to only using a certain set of technologies or methods, so we’re not stuck in our ways. We’re always ready to take in new ideas and utilize that to our advantage the best we can. So, whenever there was talk about something that came up in the presentation, we’d turn to each other and be like, ‘Oh, we could use that in this way with our product.’ And I thought that was really nice how open minded we are.”

Wrapping Up

Sometimes, it seems, someone’s favorite project of the year isn’t a project at all — instead being the springboard event for potentially a dozen other projects. It helps, of course, when you have a great team at your side to make those events even more memorable.