Jamie Peters has been writing PHP since 2004, long before frameworks became the standard. In the early years, his focus was simple: if the code worked, it was good enough. He built software in pure vanilla PHP without packages, structure, or conventions.
“I didn’t really care what my code looked like as long as it worked and did what I was trying to do,” he says. That approach carried him for more than a decade until a job in 2018 shifted everything.
Working with Laravel: A Turning Point at a SaaS Company
While working at an automotive SaaS company, Jamie was introduced to Laravel by a colleague named Kieran Brown, who later joined the Laravel team working on Laravel Forge and is now part of the AI team building Laravel Boost.
The introduction was more than a tool recommendation. It changed how Jamie wrote software and how he thought about architecture, clarity, and maintainability. He remembers being shown Laracasts and seeing Laravel used in real products, which opened a new path for his career. “Honestly, it changed my life. It changed how I thought about code and how I write code.”
Laravel brought organization and structure where there had been none, and it sparked a new appreciation for clean code. In October 2024, Jamie gave a talk at PHP Stoke on writing clean code, something he admits he never thought about a decade prior. The contrast between his early scripting days and the systems he builds now shows the impact that moment had on his career.
Work That Feels Like a Hobby
Today, Jamie is a developer at Jump24, a Laravel Diamond Partner agency in the United Kingdom. His work centers on Laravel every day and he describes it as something he genuinely enjoys rather than something he simply clocks in for.
“I’m writing Laravel every day. I’m writing code every day, and it’s not a job, it’s a hobby, and I couldn’t be happier,” he says. The framework turned development from a job into something closer to a hobby, a craft he continues to refine.
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