2026 Week 09
The news came quietly, towards the end of last week. One of our close friends had been expecting a baby, and now the baby is here.
It's one of those moments that feels both ordinary and monumental at the same time. You've been waiting, hearing updates along the way, and then suddenly there's a new life in the world. I'm genuinely happy for them. There's something grounding about seeing people you care about step into that stage of life.
Lately, I've noticed that more and more of my friends are becoming parents. One by one, they're either someone's mum or someone's dad. It feels like a visible marker of growing up. There was a time when life was just school, assignments, football, and figuring out what to do after class. Then it shifted to work — earning money, building something, trying to stand on your own. And now, for many, it's about raising children.
It makes me wonder what the next stage will look like for me.
There's a quiet fear in that thought. Sometimes I wish I were still that young boy with very little to worry about. I don't have a child yet, but I can't help wondering whether seeing people close to me raising theirs is some kind of indirect nudge. Not pressure exactly — just awareness. A gentle reminder that life keeps moving forward. I also wonder if our parents experienced something similar. Did they look around at their friends having children and feel that same mix of excitement and uncertainty?
For now, I'm just happy to witness it. To see people I love step into something new, and to reflect on where I stand in the middle of it all.
Preparing for Laracon EU
Laracon EU is next week, and preparation has been quietly building in the background.
I've been thinking a lot about how to talk to people about Helfer. It's something I built for people familiar with Laravel and even for those who aren't, and Laracon feels like the right environment to share it — even if I'm still unsure how those conversations will unfold. There's a mix of excitement and uncertainty there.
We talked about printing a barcode on a shirt so people could easily scan and check it out. Mercy helped place the order, and the shirt arrived. That felt like progress. But at the same time, there's still a lot on my plate. If I'm going to show the product to people, I want it to be in a good state — working properly, doing what it says it can do. I've been refining prompts, making sure the agent behaves as expected, making sure deployments work smoothly. I'm also considering simple coupon codes to lower the barrier for anyone curious enough to try it.
One frustrating issue has been with Laravel Cloud. After some changes to their GitHub setup, Helfer hasn't been able to deploy repositories it creates. I keep getting an “invalid repository” error, even though the repository clearly exists. I've reached out to the Laravel Cloud team, and while the response hasn't been completely reassuring yet, I'm hoping it gets resolved. That path is still the most straightforward way I'd recommend people deploy, so I'd really like it to work seamlessly.
We'll see how it unfolds.
Travel preparation always brings its own small dilemmas. What clothes do I take? How do I reduce friction? I often find myself wanting to pack almost everything and decide what to wear when I get there, rather than before. But the event is straightforward — full days on Monday and Tuesday — so simple clothing should be enough. It doesn't need to be complicated.
The Shirt and the Walk
There was, however, a small twist with the shirt.
When it arrived, we realized the barcode had been printed on the front instead of the back, which was the original plan. It wasn't what we intended. Mercy quickly tried to find a solution and located a shop that supposedly could print a replacement the same day (God bless this woman ❤️!). On Saturday, we walked through Kreuzberg to get it sorted — one of those typical morning walks that feels productive and hopeful.
But when we got there, we were told that the fastest they could print a shirt was two days, not the same day as we'd been told earlier. It was disappointing. We considered alternatives — even wearing the shirt reversed — though I wasn't fully convinced how that would look. Eventually, we had to accept it and let it be.
Sometimes preparation doesn't go exactly as planned. Sometimes you just move forward with what you have.
In a way, that feels like the theme of this season: life changing around you, new stages emerging, small setbacks before big events — and still choosing to show up anyway.
Till next time, Bosun