Getting Set Up with Laravel & Github

This morning marks the first day of my winter holiday, so I wanted to get things set up for my career shift.

Pivoting from my career pivot

After careful consideration, I've decided that becoming an Airtable consultant doesn't really suit my interests. A purely visual approach to coding inevitably leads to wrestling with buttons, and that's not a lot of fun.

In 2026, programming as we know it will change radically. The future of coding is AI, and that means I can adopt a text-based logic approach to development, i.e. asking chatbots for code! :D

In fact, I built this very blogging platform with Google AI Studio. It still took a lot of work on my part, acting as project manager, ensuring the AI would provide code that fit into the big picture. The result is a modern, fast and secure CMS, customized to my needs.

Going forward, however, I'm going to work with the PHP framework Laravel, together with its extensions Livewire and Filament, to create web-based admin tools for businesses. I think it's important to learn the tools that professionals use if I'm to be a professional myself.

Getting set up

First of all, I installed Laragon on my Windows PC. This includes PHP, Apache and databases so I can build websites offline. I'Ve been doing this with WampServer anyway, but Laragon was made with Laravel in mind, and this way, I can keep my new projects separate from my old ones.

Next, I made a simple "Hello World" page in Laravel (Laragon -> Quick app -> Laravel). Easy.

Then it was time to consider version control - recording code and all its changes.

The Bitbucket problem

In 2019, I made Shisensho Solitaire in GameMaker Studio and committed all the code to Bitbucket. Recently, I got an email saying they were going to delete inactive accounts so I would need to rescue my code and put it somewhere else.

This led me down the path of installing git on my computer, cloning the repository from Bitbucket onto my hard drive, and then eventually setting up a Github account and reuploading it there. I ran into a bunch of problems, but got there in the end with a better sense for how version control works.

All set to move forward

So now that I'm in a position to use Laravel, and have figured out version control, I'll get Gemini to teach me how to build some cool stuff.