Dennis from LaraBug: "Growing faster than I could imagine"

We have another interesting interview in our blog - this time I've invited Dennis Smink who recently launched a new Laravel-related project called Larabug, so we're talking about what is behind the scenes of this new idea. 1. For those who don’t know, tell us about Larabug in a few sentences. LaraBug is a tool that will catch all the exceptions (errors) that your application is generating and send them to LaraBug.com. You can then view per project what errors are generated. This way you are aware of those errors, because users do not always report them. Once you have fixed an error you will be able to mark the error as fixed and it will be removed from the list.

2. Larabug is a simple tool - looks like a side-project, but with pricing. So is it more like a hobby, or business? Do you already have paying customers? It started as a side project, but grew fast, faster than I could imagine. It started with a basic dashboard and no features at all, then I started tweeting through my personal account and people started to catch on to this project. Feedback was rolling in really quickly after that. I have processed most feedback that I thought was good for this project, but the goal of this project is simple: view errors in a clean interface with no clutter around. Currently there are no paying customers, I am not doing anything big with advertising, considering it's not finished yet as I would like to see it. This is not a project where I want to get rich from, it's a project which helps users to view errors easily. So I guess you could say it was a side-project, but it's currently growing fast, so the answer is somewhere in the middle.

3. There are various tools on the market for bug tracking - Bugsnag, Rollbar and others. How are you gonna compete with them? Or is Larabug different from those? Or Sentry, indeed. I am actually not in the 'state' of competing with them, or any other bug tracker. LaraBug might be similar to those, but the initial idea was to keep the interface as clean as possible. Fast clicks, free usage with decent numbers (I am actually still in the mood of upgrading the free plan just a bit more). Basically, I'm just creating an awesome project, follow my own ideas and not looking at others.

4. What was/is the most difficult challenge when working on Larabug? I haven't worked with the Laravel authorization and API much so I had to dive back into the documentation and test, test, test. Of course, there is still room for improvement, but currently it works just fine. I will not stop innovating though.

5. You’ve launched pretty recently. Did you get any traction after the launch? Are you happy with first numbers - users, comments, tweets, traction? Overall I am happy with the response the public is giving me. There are only positive comments, feedback coming in, which is just great. You can notice that this specific Laravel community is really helpful to other programmers. Like I said in the second question, after tweeting out - it started rolling. I also got some friends who have a few Laravel projects running to setup LaraBug which was received very, very well.

6. Tell a little more about yourself - any other interesting project in your bio you want to share? My name is Dennis Smink, I am 26 years old and live in the Netherlands. I work with Laravel for about 2 years now and have a lot of projects running on this framework. There are no projects in English language that I run besides LaraBug, mostly are Dutch, but I have great things on my to-do for the future, and Laravel helpers such as LaraBug!

7. Larabug is a tool for Laravel - what do you think is a secret of that framework? Why it grew so popular? Is it only about active community? The secret of Laravel is exactly what is said on its homepage. It is just clean code, it's very logical and has very good documentation/community to help you out. I haven't worked with any framework cleaner than Laravel.

Thank you for your time, Dennis, and good luck with your project(s)! For those who want to follow Dennis, here are a few links:

Dennis from LaraBug: "Growing faster than I could imagine"

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