How Laravel Changed PHP Development 🎯

Laravel started in 2011 because Taylor Otwell was frustrated with CodeIgniter. He wanted better authentication and cleaner syntax. Simple as that. 🔧 Laravel 3 (2012) introduced Eloquent ORM and Blade templates. That's when people started paying attention. 👀 Laravel 4 (2013) rebuilt everything around Composer, which was controversial but brilliant. The framework became modular and testable. 📦 Laravel 5 brought middleware and the scheduler. Laravel 5.1 was the first LTS release, proving enterprises could trust it. 🏢 Recent versions (8, 9, 10, 11,12) focus on developer experience—parallel testing, cleaner defaults, better performance. ⚡ What makes Laravel special isn't revolutionary tech. It's the philosophy: make common tasks simple, provide excellent documentation, and don't sacrifice elegance for features. The framework feels good to use, and that matters more than developers admit. ✨ The ecosystem is massive now—Forge, Vapor, Nova, Livewire. Laravel went from "Taylor's side project" to shaping how modern PHP applications get built. 🌐