Cloudways has an interview with Freek Van der Herten - one of the well-known developers in our Laravel community. They talk about Laravel ecosystem, PHP and more.

Freek is a Laravel enthusiast and a PHP developer. Also, he has been writing on his blog. He is a developer at Spatie. He belongs to Belgium and is a Zend Certified Engineer. He was a speaker at the “Uncon” of PHP Benelux conference ANTWERP 2016.

Interview with Freek Van der Herten

Cloudways: First of all, tell us what was the source of inspiration behind entering into this field? How did you start your career? What was your academic background?

Freek: From a very young age I knew I wanted to do something with computers. My dad was a computer enthusiast. As far as I know, we always had a computer and a game console in our home. For my fellow geeks: we had a Coleco Vision in our living room. So I was bitten by the computer bug from an early age.

To none of my friends or family it came as a surprised that I wanted to study IT. After getting my Bachelor’s degree I started working as a COBOL programmer at ING (a well known banking company). We had a fantastic team and did some amazing things.

A friend of mine had started his one man company to create websites. Business was going good so he needed an extra programmer. Web development was something I always wanted to do. Together with Jef, our accounting guy, I became a partner at Spatie in 2008 and have worked there ever since.

Cloudways: How do you see the Ecosystem of Laravel framework? What do you think makes it different from other PHP frameworks?

Freek: The Laravel ecosystem currently is very healthy. The core of the ecosystem is the framework itself. In the last couple of months