From Freelancer to Laravel Architect. The Artisan of the Day Is Wendell Adriel.
Wendell Adriel’s programming journey began at the age of 16 when he started teaching Microsoft Office courses. With access to programming courses like PHP, he dove in, quickly moving from student to instructor. “Teaching PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to teenagers taught me how to learn fast, search for answers, and dive into documentation, skills that are valuable to me to this date,” Wendell recalls.
After several years, he transitioned into freelancing, honing his skills on real-world projects for six years.
Discovering Laravel
Wendell first encountered Laravel while preparing to leave freelancing for a full-time role. Although he initially had no experience, he quickly embraced Laravel 5 after an interviewer suggested it. “I was amazed by how everything worked, and how simple yet powerful it looked,” he says.
“I didn't get the job. However, that changed my life, because I arrived home and started diving into Laravel.” From that moment, the PHP framework became his go-to tool for both personal and professional projects.
Building Enterprise SaaS at TrackStreet
Today, Wendell works at TrackStreet, a U.S.-based brand protection SaaS company built on Laravel. Since joining in 2018, he has progressed from Senior Software Engineer to Lead, Solutions Architect, and temporarily Engineering Manager. He will soon jump back into his previous role to work on AI projects.
He focuses on designing architectures, mentoring engineers, and building core components shared across teams. Wendell explains, “Most of the code I write now are PoCs or base components for our systems that will be used and shared across different teams and services.”
Side Projects and Open-Source Contributions
Wendell continues to explore innovative ideas in the Laravel ecosystem. He authored Best Practices for Laravel Enterprise Applications, originally intended as a blog post but expanded into a full ebook.
His data transfer object package for Laravel was downloaded over 430,000 times, and he also developed Estilo for Laravel, a package that allows developers to write CSS in PHP, supporting TailwindCSS and aiming to enable design systems purely in PHP.
Tech Stack and Approach
His primary tech stack combines Laravel with either Livewire or Inertia and Vue.js. Wendell also uses Go for specialized cases. At TrackStreet, he built the initial architecture of a large enterprise SaaS entirely in Laravel and Vue, which has maintained high code quality over time.
Conferences and Community Engagement
Wendell has spoken at local meetups, including PHP Portugal in Lisbon (2023), and attended Laracon EU the same year. He plans to participate in more conferences and hopes to have his proposals for Laracon EU accepted in the future.
In the meantime, he shares PHP and Laravel tips almost every day on social media.
Advice for Developers
“Entering software development is more challenging than ever,” Wendell notes. “My advice is to do stuff, show what you're doing, show what you're learning, and connect with people.”
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