A comprehensive talk about writing better Laravel code by focusing on proper use of Eloquent ORM features. The speaker discusses model defaults, relationship management, custom collections, and report generation patterns. He emphasizes the importance of making code readable and semantic, using real-world furniture-making analogies to illustrate concepts of craftsmanship in software development.

The talk focuses on database performance optimization in Laravel applications, specifically around Eloquent queries. Using a demo fishing social media app, the speaker demonstrates common performance pitfalls when working with Eloquent and presents solutions using sub-queries and relationship optimization. The presentation emphasizes the importance of monitoring metrics like memory usage, query count, and model hydration while showing how to avoid N+1 problems and excessive PHP memory usage when dealing with large datasets.

A talk by Christoph Rumpel about demystifying core Laravel concepts. He explains how the request lifecycle works, explores facades and their implementation, and dives into Eloquent's inner workings. The talk aims to help developers better understand Laravel's 'magic' by examining the framework's core components and implementation details.

The talk discusses database denormalization in Laravel applications, focusing on improving read performance while maintaining data integrity. The speaker explains how to use materialized views and event-driven updates to create denormalized data structures that can significantly improve query performance without sacrificing the benefits of normalized databases. The presentation includes practical examples of implementing denormalization using Laravel's eloquent ORM and queue system.

Taylor Otwell presents new features coming in Laravel 5.5, focusing primarily on API resource transformations and queue improvements. He demonstrates a new elegant way to transform Eloquent models for API responses using resources and collections, along with new queue features like time-based expirations and rate limiting with Redis. The talk includes live coding examples and covers conditional data transformations, relationship handling, and customizable response formats.

The talk discusses how to effectively model business requirements using Laravel's Eloquent ORM while following domain-driven design principles. The speaker demonstrates how to create clean, maintainable code by properly encapsulating business logic, using domain-specific language, and avoiding leaky abstractions. Using an award management system as an example, he shows how to evolve from simple CRUD operations to more complex domain models while keeping the code aligned with business terminology and requirements.

Tim McDonald discusses how to make Laravel Eloquent collections more expressive and maintainable. He explores how collections can be extended to better reflect domain language, reduce code duplication, and improve readability. The talk covers moving logic from models to custom collections, sharing filtering APIs between collections and scopes, and rethinking what Eloquent really means as a complete system rather than just models.