Streaming Global Live Events with Laravel. The Artisan of the Day Is Gustavo Karkow.
For Gustavo Karkow, Laravel has been a steady companion throughout his career.
“My journey started at a hospital in southern Brazil, where I built the AGINFO app and developed a surgery waitlist adopted across specialties. The system improved transparency and fairness for elective procedures and helped bring cancellations down to 19%. That was the moment I understood how software can serve real people.”
The project’s success showed him how technology, when applied thoughtfully, could have a direct human impact.
Building with Laravel: From Hospital Apps to Global Broadcasts
Today, Gustavo works at Digicast. There, he’s building icastGo, a streaming and live events platform serving major corporate clients in Québec and beyond. Their Laravel-based application supports around 1,000 webcasts per year, including large-scale productions that test both performance and scalability.
The platform’s top 50 online broadcasts regularly exceed 1,000 viewing hours, with peak audiences above 500 concurrent viewers. On the live events side, the system powered an international hockey tournament that streamed 175 games to 40+ countries over 12 days, complete with integrated ticketing on top of Laravel Cashier.
icastGo’s combination of backend reliability and real-time performance showcases what Laravel can do at scale when engineered with care.
Building for the Community
On top of being an engineer at Digicast, Gustavo has contributed to Laravel’s open-source ecosystem, publishing packages, writing about advanced Eloquent scoping, and creating tinker.town, a proof of concept inspired by Val Town but tailored for Laravel developers.
He also brought humor into the community with “ASTrix & oblix,” an Asterix parody comic featuring Laravel developers in a four-scene story.
Finding Belonging in the Laravel Community
In 2025, Gustavo attended his first Laracon in Denver, meeting the people behind the tools that shaped his career. “I left with a signed elephant poster and a clearer sense of belonging.”
That moment, he says, reaffirmed why Laravel has remained the platform where he does his best work. From healthcare systems to live broadcasts seen around the world, Laravel has been Gustavo’s foundation for projects that matter.
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