Hire the best Laravel Developers

All software developers will agree that development should be an enjoyable and creative experience. Laravel can make that happen.

In short, Laravel is a free, open-source PHP framework for web application development. It takes out the complexity of development by easing tasks such as routing, authentication, sessions, and caching.

Many well-established companies have chosen Laravel for their web development. Thanks to this expressive framework, they managed to create amazing projects that can still blow your mind with their simplicity and elegance.

If you're looking to hire dedicated Laravel developers, you should look for skills like:

• Knowledge of PHP
• Experience with Laravel
• Strong grasp of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
• Hands-on experience with SQL schema design, SOLID principles, REST API design

We all know that Laravel is the most popular PHP framework today. In fact, it's the most starred PHP framework on GitHub voted by 46,000 developers from around the world.

What made Laravel application development popular among PHP developers is its vast ecosystem of products and services that support a faster app development. From Homestead and Valet to Envoyer and Forge, it's undoubtedly a powerful framework that's only getting better.

Another major reason for Laravel's popularity is its large community. Hundreds of people are contributing to the Laravel code and share their knowledge daily. They create various blogs, podcasts, and tutorials that can help you kick-start your project.

And let’s not skip Laracasts, the most popular e-learning site that provides educational resources for working developers building the web with PHP and JavaScript. The site updates daily and is free to every subscriber.

There is a wide range of benefits of using the Laravel framework for your web development, including:

Secondly, even if you manage to invite developers for an interview, how can you be sure who the real experts in the language are? How can you check their capability in developing high-quality software that's maintainable, scalable, and functional?

To help you evaluate developers effectively, we've created a few sample questions you should be asking every developer.

Let these questions serve you as a guide on how to conduct an effective interview and adequately assess the qualities of a developer.

Q: What is a facade?

A: Facades give a "static" interface to classes that are accessible in the application's service container. They provide access to almost all of Laravel's features. Laravel facades act as "static proxies" to underlying classes in the service container, providing the benefit of a terse, expressive syntax while maintaining more testability and flexibility than traditional static methods.

Q: What is a Service Provider class, and what is it used for?

A: The central place of all Laravel application bootstrapping are the service providers. Your application and Laravel's core services are all bootstrapped through service providers. But, what does "bootstrapped" mean? It means registering stuff, including registering service container bindings, event listeners, middleware, and even routes. Service providers are the main place to configure your application.

Q: What is a Service Container?

A: Developers use the Laravel service container as a tool for managing class dependencies and performing dependency injection. Dependency injection means that class dependencies are "injected" into the class via the constructor or, in some cases, "setter" methods.

Q: What is Eloquent?

A: The Eloquent ORM offers a nice and simple ActiveRecord implementation for working with your database. There is a corresponding "Model" for each database table which is used to interact with that table. Models allow you to query for data in your tables, and insert new records into the table.

Q: What’s the difference between the Laravel Query Builder and Eloquent?

A: Eloquent is Laravel's implementation of Active Record pattern, and it comes with all its strengths and weaknesses. It is good to use when you process a single entity in a CRUD manner. That is, read from a database or create a new entity and then save it or delete it.

You will benefit a lot from Eloquent's features such as:

• dirty checking (to send SQL UPDATE only for the fields which have been changed)
• model events (e.g., to send an administrative alert or update statistics counter when someone has created a new account)
• traits (timestamps, soft deletes, custom traits)
• eager/lazy loading
• etc

But, it comes with some performance downside. When you process a single or just a few records, there is nothing to worry about. But when you read lots of records, the plain query builder is a better approach.

Q: What are Contracts, and what can they be used for?

A: Contracts are interfaces that define the framework's core services. For example, an Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\Queue contract defines the methods needed for queueing jobs, while the Illuminate\Contracts\Mail\Mailer contract defines the methods needed for sending an email.

Each contract has a corresponding implementation provided by the framework. For example, Laravel provides a queue implementation with a variety of drivers, and a mailer implementation that is powered by SwiftMailer . Contracts allow developers to extend the framework and build custom drivers for the core features of Laravel.

Q: What is a form request, and what can it be used for?

A: Developers create a "form request" for more complex validation scenarios. Form requests are custom request classes that contain validation logic.

Q: What is Blade?

A: Blade is a powerful templating engine that comes with Laravel. Unlike other PHP templating engines, Blade does not come with any restrictions for using plain PHP code in your views. All Blade views are compiled into plain PHP code and cached until they are modified. Meaning, Blade adds essentially zero overhead to your application. Blade view files use the .blade.php file extension and are typically stored in the resources/views directory.

Q: What is Laravel Mix?

A: Laravel Mix provides a fluent API for defining Webpack build steps for your Laravel application using several common CSS and JavaScript pre-processors. Through simple method chaining, you can fluently define your asset pipeline.

Q: What is Artisan?

A: Artisan is the command-line interface included with Laravel. It provides a number of helpful commands that can assist you while you build your application.

Q: What are queues, and what can they be used for?

A: Laravel queues provide a unified API across a variety of different queue backends, such as Beanstalk, Amazon SQS, Redis, or even a relational database. Queues allow you to defer the processing of a time-consuming task, such as sending an email, until a later time. Deferring these time-consuming tasks speeds up web requests to your application.

Q: What are events, and what's their usage?

A: Laravel's events provide a simple observer implementation. They allow you to subscribe and listen for different events that happen in your application. The app/Events directory generally stores the event classes, while the app/Listeners stores their listeners.

Events are an excellent way to decouple different aspects of your application since a single event can have multiple listeners that are not dependent on each other. For example, when an order ships, you may want to send a Slack notification to your user. Instead of coupling your order processing code to your Slack notification code, you can raise an OrderShipped event, which a listener can receive and transform into a Slack notification.

Q: What is broadcasting and why is it useful?

A: WebSockets are used to implement real time, live-updating user interfaces in many modern web applications. When some data is updated on the server, a message is typically sent over a WebSocket connection to be handled by the client.

Laravel makes it easy to "broadcast" your events over a WebSocket connection to assist you in building these types of applications. Broadcasting your Laravel events allows you to share the same event names between your server-side code and your client-side JavaScript application.

Q: What is a collection?

A: The Illuminate\Support\Collection class provides a fluent, convenient wrapper for working with arrays of data.

The Collection class allows you to chain its methods to perform fluent mapping and reducing of the underlying array. In general, collections are immutable, meaning every Collection method returns an entirely new Collection instance.

Q: What is task scheduling, and what's its primary usage?

A: Task scheduling is a process that allows you to schedule specific tasks. One such task can be to generate a weekly report and email it to the administrator with details about new user signups. The task is then executed at a specific interval (for example: once a week).

Laravel's command scheduler allows you to fluently and expressively define your command schedule within Laravel. When using the scheduler, only a single Cron entry is needed on your server. Your task schedule is defined in the app/Console/Kernel.php file's schedule method.

Q: What are migrations, and why are they useful?

A: Migrations are like version control for your database, allowing your dedicated team to modify and share the application's database schema easily. Migrations are typically paired with Laravel's schema builder to build your application's database schema easily. If you have ever had to tell a teammate to add a column to their local database schema manually, you've faced the problem that database migrations solve.

The Laravel Schema facade provides database agnostic support for creating and manipulating tables across all of Laravel's supported database systems.

Q: What are API resources, and for what are they used?

A: When building an API, you may need a transformation layer that sits between your Eloquent models and the JSON responses that are actually returned to your application's users. Laravel's resource classes allow you to expressly and easily transform your models and model collections into JSON.

Once you have a clear idea of your ideal developer, it's time to create a well-written job description. The best way to get a developer's attention is by putting together a concise and clear job description that will outline your requirements and the scope of work. Post it on online job boards, freelancing platforms, social media, or careers pages.

The job description should include:

1. Information about your company. Developers would like to hear about your company’s culture, the benefits of working there, and the team of developers they'll be working with.
2. The skills you're looking for. Explain the skills and qualifications your ideal developer should possess. If you want the candidate to have a strong grasp of SOLID principles, for example, you should mention it in the job description.
3. Their responsibilities. Will the developer be required to test and maintain the core product software? Or will they need to build innovative, state-of-the-art applications? You must outline their responsibilities in the job description clearly.
4. The length of the project. Don't forget to let developers know if they'll be working on a smaller or larger project.
5. Set a budget. The job post should also include your budget for the project and whether it's going to be a fixed-price or an hourly contract.

Is it expensive to hire a highly skilled Laravel software developer?

There's no pre-set rate for a Laravel developer. Their cost can depend on several factors, including:

• Experience. Hiring a less experienced developer can cost you less than hiring a senior full-stack developer. There's always the risk that a less skilled developer will not code as fast and well as a senior developer.
• Freelancer or an agency? The cost of a developer can also depend on whether you will be working directly with freelance Laravel developers or going through an agency.
• Full-time or part-time? Hiring freelancers can be quite straightforward. But hiring full-time employees comes with a lot of other costs, including benefits, equipment, and onboarding costs.
• The scope of work. Cost is directly related to the nature of the work that needs to be done. Whether you'll need database migration or coding a new social media app, the deliverables you’ll need will determine the cost.

How soon can a developer complete your project?

Basic? This type of project can be built rapidly as its functionalities are quite simple.

Medium-complexity? This type of project has more complicated features, meaning it requires more time and people to build it.

Complex? Complex projects are time-consuming as they have a complex architecture, multiple integrations, security matters, etc.

What steps should I take to hire developers?

In short, the road to hiring an experienced developer consists of:

1. Outlining the nature of your project and the scope of work that needs to be done.
2. Putting together a well-written job description that will clearly define the skills, requirements, and length of the project.
3. Reviewing applications and shortlisting promising candidates.
4. Interviewing the best candidates to assess whether they'll be a great fit for your development company and the project.

Hiring exceptional talent is crucial for the success of your project and your team's productivity. The road to discovering such talent might be challenging, but it is possible when you know what steps you need to take. Hopefully, this guide will help you discover that hidden gem in a pool of candidates and make your project a major success.