Using Laravel in the enterprise - Nigel James
Good day, and welcome back to the hallway track podcast. My name is Mitchell Davis, and I've got some explaining to do. It's been 2 months now since I last released an episode. I bet you thought I threw in the towel. Well, I've had probably the busiest 2 months of my life, and something had to give.
Mitchell Davis:The big news is that I went on a holiday, and I got engaged to who is now my fiance, Nicole. And let me tell you, planning that trip and the proposal took a lot of my attention. We had an amazing trip to Singapore and the Maldives, and I came back in late Feb ready to kick things off again and start making more content. Chris, who works with me at Atlas Software, started writing some articles for Laravel, Inertia, and Expo, which is a React Native framework, and those did the rounds on the Internet, which was awesome. You can check them out at atlas.dev.
Mitchell Davis:I then got ready to start recording the show again, and one of our dogs unfortunately messed up his knee and had to have knee surgery. Fortunately, the surgery went well, and he's sitting next to me as I record this intro. That dog sitting has taken a lot of my time for the last few weeks. A quick update on the format of the show. So I found it really hard to organize scheduling 2 guests simultaneously across different time zones.
Mitchell Davis:So for at least the next few episodes, they'll just be 1 on ones. I'll still be talking with a variety of people across different levels of popularity and geographies, but for now, it'll just be me and them directly. With all that being said, let me tell you about our guest today, Nigel James. Nigel lives about an hour north of me in New South Wales, Australia, and now works primarily with large enterprise clients as you'll hear about later. He runs a company called Square Cloud.
Mitchell Davis:He writes code in a variety of languages, but he's currently focusing on Laravel, and he has plenty of interesting expressions that I've never heard before. Nigel and I recorded this episode on March 6th, which was the week before parable 11 came out, which is why you'll hear us talking about the upcoming release. As a side note, you'll later hear Nigel talk about SAP, which I had heard of before, but I didn't quite know what it was. So let me give you the cliff notes now if you're in the same position. SAP or SAP is a huge accounting system that's been around since the seventies.
Mitchell Davis:It's used by really big organizations like governments and true enterprise businesses. It has modules for everything, so you can track your inventory or your supply chain or what have you in it. And Nigel calls it 0 on on steroids for those that know about Xero. We had a great discussion, and I actually found a lot of overlap with how we got started in PHP. I really hope you enjoy the show.
Mitchell Davis:Okay. Nigel, could you introduce yourself, please?
Nigel James:Hey. I'm, my name is Nigel James. I'm an enterprise software developer. That means I've generally worked with, larger companies and government organisations to develop their business systems.
Mitchell Davis:I wanna start by asking you, what's a typical day look like for you? What's a day in the life?
Nigel James:Yeah. So depending on a a different engagement, a lot of the days, it would be, you know, development. You know, if we're in the early stages of a project. It could be, lots of discussions about process. Some projects it's, you know, having a workshop with, team members who will be, you know, using the the product at the end of the day and basically going through, you know, what they basically requirements gathering kind of thing, what they want, what they're looking for, how they work, that sort of thing.
Nigel James:And, you know, obviously, once you've once you've got all that down, then you just gotta build stuff and, you know, work with your team and and all that sort of thing. So, pretty normal software development stuff.
Mitchell Davis:Are you working solo or with a team? What's that look like?
Nigel James:Yeah. Generally, I'm working with a team. For the for the projects that I do, most of the time, it's definitely with the team. Although, having said that, I have worked on projects by myself where I'm I'm the only guy there. You know, you're it's basically a small piece of work, so it doesn't need a a cast of 1,000, but I've also worked with, you know, large large projects, where you are not a small cog in a big thing, but, you know, it it's like that scene in The Matrix where all those computers go back forever.
Nigel James:You feel like, oh my goodness. There are so many people working on this project. What do they all do? You know?
Mitchell Davis:I do wonder that.
Nigel James:How how much is this company burning on this project every every month? But, you know, that's that's the fun stuff. So yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Awesome. What got you into software in general?
Nigel James:That's a good question. I think kind of getting out of school, I've I'd kinda gone down the engineering route, you know, classic engineering, because I had a friend who was a civil engineer, and I thought, oh, great. Civil engineering. So I chose all my subjects, in year 10, you know, when you choose your subjects
Mitchell Davis:Yep.
Nigel James:To to kinda target engineering at uni. And then I got to year 12, and I thought, oh, engineering sounds boring. It's it's just making roads and stuff. I'm not really sure I wanna do that. May maybe I wanna do something a bit more creative.
Nigel James:Maybe architecture. They they make pretty things, and they have have big monuments to themselves, all that sort of stuff. And, so I I actually started an architecture degree at uni, and then they kinda pretty soon, I figured I really like all the engineering stuff that we do because it was basically half and half. You do a kind of an engineering type subject, on structures and things, and you do a design type subject, you know, on you know, with these constraints, create some sort of building or or space or whatever the particular assignments were, and I loved the engineering type subjects and didn't quite warm to as much the, design type subjects. So after a little bit, I, I dropped out, did some other things, worked for a bit, and then eventually, I figured, this this career in retail isn't really getting me where I wanna go.
Mitchell Davis:Sure.
Nigel James:So I thought, let's let's go and try some TAFE courses for for those not aware of our lovely TAFE system. They're basically vocational training college. So I went and did a a computer programming course in visual basic 3, and that kind of scratched the itch. And then I thought, okay. If if I'm gonna do this, I need something more than a just a a visual basic 3 course.
Nigel James:So I rang some, recruiters, and I said, okay. I wanna get into computing. Should I should I do, like, a boot camp course, like these, you know, 6 month high intensity, we promise you a job. 90% of our people get hired. Should I go and do a TAFE course, or should I should I just bite the bullet and go back to uni?
Nigel James:And everyone pretty much said, long term, like, you can do any of those 3, you'll be able to get you a job somewhere. But long term, best bet is to go back to uni. So we just I did that. Alright. So I went back as a mature age student at about 25.
Nigel James:Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Well, compared to compared to all the 18 year olds I was studying with.
Mitchell Davis:That's true.
Nigel James:And and, got a degree. And then at the end of the degree, I got a job through the enterprise sorry, through the, you know, graduate systems that they have in place, and you do interviews with stacks of people. And, you know, one of one of the shiny companies hires you. Yeah. So that so that's how I that's how I got into IT.
Mitchell Davis:What, what language was that?
Nigel James:At uni? Or
Mitchell Davis:well, when you got hired, rather, what language did you
Nigel James:So so, basically, I went with, one of the, this is kind of a dirty word in Australia now, PricewaterhouseCoopers, because, yes, they've just had some rather unfortunate scandals with the government.
Mitchell Davis:Yep.
Nigel James:Oops. But back then, they'd just been merged with, Coopers and Lion Brand and, water where did the price come from? Price Waterhouse. Yeah. So that became Price Waterhouse Coopers.
Nigel James:So they were a consulting firm because they were trying to separate the the firm bit that did, audits, the kind of the classic accounting side.
Mitchell Davis:Yep.
Nigel James:And the consulting kinda company that did put in the software, so they didn't want those 2 entities to probably for similar reasons as what they're in trouble for now of, you know, the audit side knowing basically, auditing what the the implementation side has just done anyway. All that aside, they said, well, we've got this, kind of Oracle group, kind of VB group, or a, SAP group. Alright. I've been reading the paper, and I knew what SAP was, and some of my colleagues, in 3rd year had done a practical unit with some of the local companies using you know, tweaking their s SAP system, doing some small project with it. And so I'd already been kind of working part time with a company that had been doing kind of that VB and access kind of systems.
Nigel James:You can tell I'm dating myself here by saying access. Bye. But, gonna not yeah. That's it. But, this I thought SAP is the way to go.
Nigel James:So I joined the SAP group. There's about 30 of us that joined or or thereabouts, and they very quickly sent us on a on a course overseas to their training center in in Philadelphia and taught us this language called ABAP, which is effectively SAP's proprietary business language language. Yeah. So it kinda sits in the middle layer. Well, it actually generates, UIs.
Nigel James:Back then, they were very bad UIs. Everyone complained about set UIs. Basically, you know, you're doing selecting stuff from the database, merging it, you know, all that classic business stuff, and then putting it on a screen and, you know, someone would tweak something, change something, you know, all the kind of crud stuff, plus other fancy business logic that's involved with, you know, all those kind of modules that I talked about before, whether it's
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Nigel James:You know, CRM or logistics or or, you know, classic accounting systems, debits and credits, you know, running month end processes, that sort of stuff. So, initially, I was just once we got back from that course, just helping, you know, classic kind of engagement was, oh, they need a report to show this. And and back then, it was basically almost like printing out characters onto an 80 character kinda report thing that would get printed out either on the screen, and it had some fancy bits to on the screen, but, you know, let let's not kid ourselves. It wasn't that fancy, Or or you could you could print them out. You know?
Nigel James:So that's kinda how it started, and then I kind of then y 2k came along. Yeah. And they were getting a little oh, yeah. So there was a stack of work up to y two k, obviously, because everyone was fixing all that stuff, and then kind of early 2000, they were like, oh, we're running at work now because everyone's spent their budgets. We're gonna retrain you in this thing called Siebel, which was a CRM system.
Nigel James:So that's kinda disappeared these days. And so I did a little bit of training on that, but never really got on a Siebel project. And about halfway to end of that year, I went and joined a company, this is really dating me, that was doing working with IBM Lotus Notes databases. And they were producing a content management system out of Lotus Notes Databases. Wow.
Nigel James:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:You've done it all, haven't you?
Nigel James:So so, so they kind of hide me because they were trying to work with some bigger bigger companies that had SAP systems, and they wanted to surface some of that content into, you know, their content management system. And so they yeah. We were kind of a they thought I was a good match for that kind of stuff.
Mitchell Davis:Nice.
Nigel James:So I did did some proof of concepts there for a little bit. And then my wife came home one night about 6 months later and said, I think we're being boring. I think we need to go to the UK. We didn't have any kids at the time, and we thought, oh, okay. Yeah.
Nigel James:That sounds fun. Let's do that. So we upped and moved to the UK, and we we lived in the UK for about 10 years. It's basically all the all the naughties Oh. As we like to call them.
Nigel James:And so I went back just doing SAP stuff and, you know, classic reports again and then some HR HR work, and some other other other fun projects as well.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. You have done it all. That's that's a lot. Covered a lot of technologies there.
Mitchell Davis:I'm curious because this is you know, primarily, this podcast is largely targeted at Laravel developers. Mhmm. I have to ask them, when did you get into at least PHP? Forget about Laravel.
Nigel James:Yeah. Yeah. PHP. So I was I was just trying to do something on the side, you know, very soon 1999 ish, partly like it's 1999. And I'd got into this I'd found out this thing because I was a little bit into the mice so the Microsoft scene with, access, like I said, and VB and VBA and and Excel.
Nigel James:And so I'd I'd known all about ASP, active server pages that Microsoft had done. And I was chatting to a friend, and he said, oh, did you know about this thing called PHP, and it's open source? I said, oh, okay. I'll give that a go. I think it was version 3 at the time.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Sounds
Nigel James:great. Probably probably checked that, but version 4 was coming out pretty soon after that. So I had a I had a bit of a muck around with it. And then, later, I was I was with a a charity that needed to it was often doing, you know, collections and needed to count the cash and thing from donations and and the like. And they're doing it all quite manually and and whatever, and I said, oh, look.
Nigel James:We we could just put a little, kinda have a little network here in the thing, and and we could just write a couple of web pages to simplify this process, like count all of the denominations. Okay. We've got, you know, so many, what, pound notes and 20 pound notes or whatever, and just make this process a little easier and record the checks. They they they were bits of paper that people used to write on and sign, just in case somebody doesn't
Mitchell Davis:know what the check's done. People still use them,
Nigel James:but, people Most of the US, I think, still use checks, so that's, like, remarkable about how checks are still used. Anyway, so, basically, we put together a bit of that, and then a friend of mine who was doing some stuff in another part of the organisation had started doing some other pieces, and so we kinda brought those together and we built this kind of system for charities that we kind of built together. It was built in PHP and, you know, the classic start an HTML page and drop into PHP and do a bit of database logic and query your query your, your database and then do a loop, you know, in and out of PHP
Mitchell Davis:statements. Yeah.
Nigel James:Those pages. Yep. Gosh. Those pages look messy. And so I'd I'd done things a little bit, more sensibly, shall I say, because I'd I'd been reading, Laura and Laura Thompson and Luke Welling's how to do PHP book.
Nigel James:It's not the the title, but, anyway, how to do PHP and MySQL or something. And so I'd at least had the knowledge of how to separate things out and whatever. And when I was, you know, started collaborating with my friend, I said, look. If we're gonna do this, we're going to at least do it properly, and and how about we use Zen framework because that was the framework du jour of the time. Yeah.
Nigel James:And and let's at least, put a bit of structure and and formality about what we're doing. And so, you know, he started he he was good with this. Oh, and we we also started using a, a version control system, which was subversion. And Subversion. Yep.
Nigel James:The SVM. Subversion. Yeah. Yeah. And then we, so we started yeah.
Nigel James:Because there's now 2 of us checking in and checking out to the same code base and and all that sort of thing. So we were and it's it started to get pretty good, and we had a few customers and the like. But, as a kind of side hustle, kind of after about 3 years or so, we were like, this really isn't hustling as far as it could go because, firstly, we're doing it for charities. And charities have deep pockets and short arms. And even though even though you could show them the value of what we were doing and what it could do and how that had a member's register and all this sort of stuff, they were like, well, we won't pay that and just use Excel, you know, or whatever.
Nigel James:And so or we've got a volunteer who will come in and update that system for us. It's like, oh, poor volunteers. Yep. So so as much as it was a, you know, a bit of a bit of a crack at doing a side hustle, it didn't quite work just because the the target was the target didn't appreciate the value of of Right. Of what we were providing.
Nigel James:And and I found that if you've gonna if you're going to try and pitch something, then find something with people who have actually budgets and money to spend, which is why which is why, during the the GFC, as as we like to term it, I I very fortunately got a a contract with Shell, and Shell was upgrading their HR system at the time. And it was a project that they couldn't cancel because they definitely had to pay their people. They definitely had to track, you know, all their qualifications and the like. Yep. And it was, you know, it was basically critical infrastructure for them.
Nigel James:They couldn't not do this project. So it wasn't like this was a a a little whim of the CEO and and, you know, it was like, okay. We're cutting back. That project's getting slammed. It was Yep.
Nigel James:It was great. So right through the GFC when some people were chasing work and whatever, I was very happily engaged, yeah, and busy. So that was fun. Very cool. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Absolutely. Cool. Well, it's a really interesting timeline. I see a lot of parallels, actually, because I was, I went to uni as well.
Mitchell Davis:I did originally, I was doing a physics, physics and computer engineering degree And pretty quickly realized the part I like the most is the software part The computer stuff like the electronics interesting Physics, interesting. But I really like the software side. And I've been writing code since I was like 13, I think. Got started fairly early with PHP and yep. I remember writing the same things with all, like, your database code and, like, all your logic and everything all mixed HTML.
Mitchell Davis:And then, yeah, I I, changed degrees to just focus on software.
Nigel James:I got a job,
Mitchell Davis:at a school, actually, up in Newcastle. And we haven't talked about where you're based yet, but, not too far north of of the Central Coast where you live. That's where I basically grew up on the coast. And, yes. So I got a job in Newcastle.
Mitchell Davis:I was going to uni in Newcastle, and, again, drew some parallels because we wrote an application when I worked at this school. I sort of spearheaded this project of, you know, those boxes of chocolates the kids sell, when they're doing fundraising? Yep. So we wrote this system that had, like, printed out barcodes, and, like, tracked inventory for these kids, like, in fundraising. And then, yeah, they would bring it, back into this office.
Mitchell Davis:And, like, the staff there at the school, they would log in to the system that we build on their Internet and then scan the barcode. And that would record which kid had sold, you know, many chocolates or whatever. And, that was written in Zen. I hadn't even heard of Laravel at that point. And, we were using Subversion as well.
Mitchell Davis:So as you are, like, going through and talking about these projects, I'm like, man, I've done basically the same thing, not the same, but similar. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting parallels.
Nigel James:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Not too long after that, I learned about Laravel, and then started using Git, and then everything changed to basically where I'm at now. But yeah. Interesting beginnings there. Okay. So let's talk about enterprise software.
Mitchell Davis:So, firstly, can you define for me how you see the meaning of the words enterprise software?
Nigel James:I think for me, it's just where I can I I can take it 2 ways? You can take it as software that helps run an enterprise. So in in which case, Xero is enterprise software. Doesn't matter that you're, you know, a a contractor like me who generates 1 invoice a month, and has about, you know, 6 expense transactions. So the the scale of transaction is is
Mitchell Davis:not big,
Nigel James:but it's effectively software for this SME, small and medium enterprise, I guess you could say. So that's kinda enterprise software, but I think the classic thing that people would think is kinda more the other thing. It's kinda software at scale where it's that stuff that I talked about earlier where it's publicly listed companies, large governmental departments and things that that need to process a lot of transactions. So, you know, for, let's say, the, in Australia, we've got, services Australia that has which is basically looks after, you know, well welfare payments, so that's a lot of payment transactions going out to a lot of people in the nation, either fortnightly or or monthly. You need a a robust system to be able to take care of all those records and and and make sure it's stable and robust and paying the right people and and all those sorts of things.
Nigel James:So, basically, transactions at scale, I guess, is the classic version, but I but, again, I I take it to be any software that is for a business, which is an enterprise of sorts, even if it's a a start up, you know, you you've got a trajectory, is is enterprise software, and enterprises need different bits of software. I mean, it's not just an enterprise. It's only an accounting system. You need a
Mitchell Davis:Sure.
Nigel James:A way to keep track and keep your customers happy. Generally a customer relationship management system, a CRM, you need to be able to pay your employees. You need an HR system. And if you're doing something in the manufacturing space or logistics or warehousing or those sorts of things, you need those kind of bits and pieces. And so a lot of companies will try and do best of breed, and other types of companies will pick one dirty great big bucket of software like, SAP Systems or Oracle Systems, and try and make every shoe on everything into that.
Nigel James:Hoping that it that will either solve all their woes or that they'll be able to customise it so that it does. Yeah. And and they're they're the classic projects I've worked on. But having said that, I've also worked in a start up environment where we were building a a fintech of sorts, where we were taking a whole lot of invoices, processing, checking budgets, effectively operating as a a bit like a intermediary, and, you know, processing that transactions. And that was all run off a, a Laravel custom bespoke system.
Nigel James:So, you know, nothing, nothing, you know, off the shelf software, like, you know, we didn't didn't go, oh, yeah. Let's get SAP and or let's get Salesforce in or
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Nigel James:Those sorts of things and go, and and let's build something off that. We basically started from scratch and, started started doodling on, pads of paper.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Okay. Right. That's interesting. I almost never draw stuff out when I'm designing.
Mitchell Davis:It's all just like it's in my head or it's text. But I'm rarely, like, it's funny. I I kind of think I think I think visually. But I'm like, I never I never seem to get to the drawing at out stage. I don't know.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Nigel James:I'm not good with pen
Mitchell Davis:I I just feels like it.
Nigel James:Exactly. I I think a picture tells a 1,000 words. And as much as I like to go from that, oh, I've got it perfectly imagined in my head, and I can just, you know, start writing, classes and and, methods and and whatever whatever. It barely works out the best result that way. It's like if I sketch it out a little bit and go, oh, this relates to that and this to that or, you know, this is kind of what we wanna see on the screen.
Nigel James:What does that mean in terms of a, you know, a a schema in the back end or those sorts of things? Yeah. I find I find I get a better result that way. Mhmm.
Mitchell Davis:Or at
Nigel James:least at least a a a better idea of what I'm trying to do.
Mitchell Davis:So are you working with Laravel more now, or is Laravel still kind of sparingly mixed in amongst, SAP and Salesforce?
Nigel James:Yeah. So so I'm I'm kind of funemployed at the moment. So I'm, I'm I still have a client that, I'm doing some support with for on a on a Laravel project, and I'm basically looking for another, suitor to to take up the slack on my dance card, so to speak.
Mitchell Davis:Suitor. You're full of interesting expressions.
Nigel James:So so yeah. So I'm I'm basically enjoying a bit of downtime, having having some fun, with my, daughter who's still at home. So, going and doing some fun things or, you know, she's just she started uni. So, all of those all of those good things. But, yeah.
Nigel James:So I'm I'm, you know, not only looking for work, but, you know, just using the time to to, poke into some fun things, and and, I'm learning a little bit of rust at the moment too, which is which is much more fun than what I thought it would be. At uni, I always I hated c at uni. It's just like, oh my goodness. This is just way too low level for me. I I I don't care about pointers and and keeping track of memory and all that sort of stuff.
Nigel James:It's like, I just wanna write a I just wanna write an app. You know? Which is why, you know, Visual Basic was was so much fun initially because, you know, you had had the whole scaffolding of of, you know, any infrastructure that, you know, you can just write an app around and talk to an access database or a micro SQL Server database really easily and that sort of stuff, and and that's why Laravel's so appealing because it comes batteries included, right, if everything pretty much want is there, and and when it's not there, they'll kinda then suddenly include it. Like, you know, revert is coming out soon, and and, you know, there's a first party first first party package for, you know, for doing all those web socket stuff, which is fantastic. You know, it's like it's just the I think it's just the best SaaS startup pack you'd ever want.
Nigel James:You know? Yeah. So so that's kind of why I like the idea of, kind of Laravel enterprise software when you take that I mean, not that you're gonna rewrite an SAP system in Laravel. That's that's just nuts. It's just like sometimes rewriting stuff is good and sometimes rewriting stuff is just you're insane.
Nigel James:You you wouldn't do that. You've got a working system. Who cares that you don't like the particular flavour of language that it's written in? It works. It's it's a black box.
Nigel James:You've got APIs. You can talk to it with whatever language you want. Just let it run. But, you know, if you're starting something from scratch or you're making some sort of integration to these bigger pieces of software, then there's there's no reason that Laravel or PHP should be off the table because they've just got such a great developer experience that, you know, why why fight? Like, if you've got Laravel or PHP developers, there's no reason to go and have to retrain in c sharp or something just because you're dealing with this enterprise software.
Nigel James:Exactly.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Nigel James:Because there's no reason to go and have to retrain a whole set of Java developers because, you know, that's what enterprise software is. You know? I I believe Laravel with, you know, queues and and what they're doing with things like Frank and PHP, you know, can can do just as well. And and if you can get the result out the door and ship it quicker because of those conveniences, and the fact that it's got all the box and dice all altogether, then go for it.
Mitchell Davis:Exactly. Yeah. I feel the same way. I think that there's quite a bit of maybe prejudice or, like, a stigma around, enterprise software only being able to be written in maybe a a certain subset of languages. You know?
Mitchell Davis:It was like particularly, what comes to mind for me is Java. Java just feels like it exudes this energy of, like, oh, this is for really big businesses that know what they're doing and, you know, all of this crap. It's like, what are you talking about? Like, Laravel is Yeah. Amazing.
Mitchell Davis:PHP is amazing, but particularly Laravel. And everything that we can do with it, it's just incredible. You're right. There's so many batteries included. They keep adding more.
Mitchell Davis:Amazing. Aside we couldn't ask for much better than that. And, certainly, it's so quick, to develop your applications in. So Exactly.
Nigel James:I think the the criticism comes because people think of PHP as that as what we talked about at the beginning where, you know, you you've got an HTML page and you're just dropping into, you know, some sort of scripting language and then calling your database and all of that stuff just smudged into into one without realising that PHP has moved away on from there and and the, all the things that they're adding, you know, at a at a crazy rate of knots each year, you know, with the dot releases that are coming out. It's such a a a great language to work with. So, you know, look. I've got nothing against Node or Java. I've I've used that.
Nigel James:You know, a Apex in in, Salesforce and ABAP in in SAP, they're all great languages. You know, but at the end of the day, there's a business problem to solve. So, pick up the tool that works best for your team. You know, if you if you've got a shop that is, you know, working in Java and that's what you do, then fantastic. If you've got a shop that's dot net and that's what you do, great.
Nigel James:You know, it's not that one is better than the other, but it's it's the fact that you can't people come to say, well, now that you're like, okay. You've done your website. That's very nice. Good for you. But now we're now we're doing the real software.
Nigel James:You know? Now now we're, you know, it's not just your personal home page anymore. You know? Now now we're writing a real application, and and we need to use .net for that, or we need to use Rust or your these newfangled things. You know?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Nigel James:Yeah. Look. I'm I'm not against any technology. As you've seen, I've I've worked through, used a lot of stuff, and, you know, I'm I'm of the of opinion if there's a tool that works and it works for your team, then use the tool, and don't don't worry about what other other people say. And and that's why I was comfortable in choosing Laravel and PHP for the financial system that we built because, one, I knew one, I knew it, so when I was reviewing code, I would be able to understand it.
Nigel James:2, I knew we could hire for it, and I knew we'd be able to hire reasonable developers because it was, you know, well established and a mature framework. And, 3, I don't think there is a 3. I think they're they're the 2 things.
Mitchell Davis:If you
Nigel James:know something and and and you can hire a team for it, then what else do you need? You know, if if you're gonna go fancy fancy latest bits and pieces, you might they might be the more expensive or harder to get. Yeah. So, you know, economics, I guess, supply and demand.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Totally. Okay. So, I want to ask you, you mentioned earlier, like working for Shell in particular. You've also worked with, Xerox Brother, and then you mentioned, local and federal governments.
Mitchell Davis:I'm really curious. How did you get in front of these businesses, being, you know, a solo developer or a small team? Yeah. What's that process like? How how did you come across those, businesses and opportunities?
Nigel James:So once I'd done the work at PwC and I had, you know, a couple of years of, you know, let's say ABAP development under my belt, and I'd worked at this other company in in the UK, Sorry. In in Australia that done this, Lotus Notes stuff. I figured, well, I can just, so by that point, I'd gone over to, the UK, and I was basically, you know, shopping myself out. So I was basically just ringing recruiters and say, okay, mister recruiter, you know, these are my skills. Where can you find me a project?
Nigel James:And that's pretty much been the way it still is today. So, like, you know, in in my fun employment, I'm still talking to, you know, recruiting companies and saying, you know, where are the projects? Because there's no one there's no way that I can submit a tender to, you know, the the government tender site when they're looking to spend, you know, $30,000,000 on a project as a single developer and go, oh, yeah. I'd be good on that project. You know, they they need a team.
Nigel James:And so they'll they'll talk to a a system integrator, you know, like or or, Accenture or one of those big companies, and then Accenture will go, oh, penny penny. We need some developers to do this project. And so they talk to the recruiting companies, and they talk to me. Right. So that's kind of the general process of how you you get into these things.
Nigel James:And then after a while, you've worked with similar people, and so the bit of the word-of-mouth network get goes on and and you go to kinda networking events or whatever, and, you find out where people are working and and what jobs might be around or, you know, what contracts are coming up or those sorts of things. So, after a while, it's a little bit of word-of-mouth, and I've and, thankfully, some some work I've been able to find where I've been able to go direct to the company. You know, nothing against recruiters, but, you know, if you don't have if they don't have to clip their ticket on the way through, that's better for me. Yeah. So the the process is basically hitting up seek, or ringing the the recruiting companies and saying, you know, who's who's got a project on?
Nigel James:Where are they? What are they doing? Those sorts of things.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. So with those contracts then, is that like, I'm I guess I'm sorta curious from the business and more technical end. Like, are you then engaged to them at a personal level? You're engaging in that contract with them personally, or is that through Square Cloud? Your
Nigel James:Yeah. So I've so I've established a a company for for the purposes of of contracting. Yep. So my company I work for my company. My company works engages with, you know, let's say, Ernst and Young or as they like to be known these these days, and they will engage in term have a contract with, great big government department or or big company, you know, energy company
Mitchell Davis:or something
Nigel James:like that. And so, you know, there's there's a lot of, yeah, little little hops that everything goes through, but that that's kinda how it all works.
Mitchell Davis:Everyone gets their slice.
Nigel James:Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Nigel James:But, I mean, it it works out for everybody. You know?
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Nigel James:Energy company gets a a system to keep track of where all their poles are. Yep. And, and, I get some money in the bank.
Mitchell Davis:That's it. Yeah. Cool. I didn't even know that that was a route, to be honest with you, of going through recruiters for more project based work as a company. I would have thought, okay.
Mitchell Davis:Maybe that is more for individuals. Obviously, contract work exists, but I wouldn't have thought that that you could do that under your own company. You know?
Nigel James:Yeah. So so, basically, when I'm talking to recruiters, they want to know, do you have your own ABN, Australian business number for for those not familiar, in which case, they'll just give me a a bulked up rate, and I take care of, you know, all the all the good things like super and blah blah blah. If I'm if I'm not if I was disengaging as myself, then they would they would basically act as a an employment company, and they would be paying me a rate and then plus super. So I'd have to then provide them my super details and
Mitchell Davis:Cool. K.
Nigel James:All of those That's really interesting.
Mitchell Davis:I I I didn't even know about that. So so there you go.
Nigel James:There you go. There you go.
Mitchell Davis:Great. So why don't we change gears as we start get towards the end here? Could you just talk to me a little about your nonwork interests? What else do you get up to?
Nigel James:So I I am exercising to try and reduce my girth, so to speak, because, yeah, I need to. And so that for a little while, that was going to the gym, you know, a couple of days a week and whatever, but recently we've got a dog. So, and our dog is just just hyper. You know? She wakes up she's definitely a morning a morning person dog, a morning dog.
Nigel James:And she wakes up and she says, hello. I'm down here.
Mitchell Davis:Yep.
Nigel James:Come and take me for a walk. And so if if you you can get away with doing not taking her for a walk, but you kinda pay for it later in the day when she's like, I'm bored now. I'm bored now. Come Come on, play with me. I'm bored now.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Yep.
Nigel James:So, so lately, I've been basically doing about a 4 k walk in the morning.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Nigel James:Which really it's lovely. She's she's now starting to behave and and walk on the loose lead really well, which is nice. So that really sets up my day quite well because, you know, I'm out looking at the you know, everything that's outside, and the sun's just coming up, and I'm going, wow. You know, it's another day. And I come back in, and, you know, dog's really happy because he's been for a walk.
Nigel James:Yep. And then lay
Mitchell Davis:down on the floor and feel like, okay.
Nigel James:And then they go back to sleep and you think, oh, great.
Mitchell Davis:Just
Nigel James:turn on the coffee machine. And then and then occasionally, I I like to get out on the kayak, take it down to the to the water, and go out for a kayak, and, that's that's a fun experience. You know, the
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Nigel James:The water's generally smooth enough if I'm out kayaking. Sometimes I do go out when it's a little bit windier than what it should be. Yep. But that that's kind of, I like that a little bit. And then, and then occasionally, I'll I'll, I like to get out and, I've got a Canon d ninety that I like to go out and shoot the landscape a little bit.
Nigel James:Yeah. And, occasionally, I've I've I've got some friends, and, occasionally, when we all get organised, which isn't very often, to be honest, we'll go away on a weekend and and, shoot some photos together, which is fun.
Mitchell Davis:So yeah. Yeah. Cool. You you I should get you in touch with Marty Marty Friedel because, I know he does landscape photography as well. We talked
Nigel James:about Cool.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. Couple months
Nigel James:now. I know Marty through the, Stanamic user group.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Well, so so he's into it as well.
Mitchell Davis:I, I've just bought a camera. It's probably nowhere near as fancy as yours and Marty's, but it's a Canon R50. And Okay. I've got it primarily because I wanna start recording screencasts. And Yes.
Mitchell Davis:I've just been on a holiday, though, overseas, and I took it there. We went to Singapore and Maldives. And Nice. Yeah. I took it there, and I, took a bunch of photos, and I kinda got the bug.
Mitchell Davis:It was awesome. Yeah. Like, I've been exposed to photography years ago. And a partner an ex partner, was quite into photography. And I never tried it, but I, you know, I would see her taking photos and all the prep that goes into it and selecting the right settings for the environment that you're in and all this sort of stuff.
Mitchell Davis:And I still I just have no idea what I'm doing. Most of the shooting I was doing was just the auto mode, and it magically figures it out for you. But I did try a few different things, tweaking the ISO and so on. And, the kit that I bought has 2 lenses as well. And so, that was cool sort of seeing the difference and what that looks like.
Mitchell Davis:Nice. And Yeah. Yeah. I was immediately I was like, oh, maybe I should buy more lenses. Like
Nigel James:no. It it's lenses are an n plus one problem if ever there was one. I'm gonna drop by the the camera shop and go. Oh. That's true.
Nigel James:That'd be nice. Oh, that'd be nice. Oh, yeah. I like the look of that. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. So Yeah. I I gotta reel it back in a little, but,
Nigel James:I know. Yeah. With it so far. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:It's really nice to take photos because I've never been one to take many photos just on my phone and not really capture moments. I've sort of found it a bit awkward. You know? Oh, hey. No.
Mitchell Davis:Let's take a take a together or things like that. Starting to get more into it because it is really nice to be able to look back. You know? I took we're only gone a week, and I took 900 photos. So that's a lot of memories that I could look back on versus, like, previous holidays where maybe I took, like, the info.
Nigel James:A lot. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's true.
Nigel James:Back in the day, we had had the little film cameras where you'd take it, and at the end of the holidays, you'd come home and and go, oh, look at all these photog photos that, mom cut the head off or it's framed really badly.
Mitchell Davis:It's blurry here or whatever. Yeah. The smudge
Nigel James:on the lens.
Mitchell Davis:So you had no idea about
Nigel James:yep. And they these days, you get this little preview thing. You can go, oh, yeah. That was bad. Let's delete that one and take another couple.
Nigel James:That's right. Yeah. So good.
Mitchell Davis:It is. Cool. Look, Nigel, I think that covers everything, all the questions that I had for you. Was there anything else that you wanted to go through that we didn't chat
Nigel James:Oh, look. I I just wanna underline the the the point that I think Laravel's a great a great toolkit for an enterprise system. You know, whether that's integrating with some of the big name stuff because, you know, they've all got APIs. There's no reason you can't use something like Laravel to integrate into something else. Or if you're starting something from scratch, some sort of SaaS thing that's effectively enterprise software, Laravel's a great choice.
Nigel James:It's it's got everything included, queues, reverb. You know? It's all it's all there, and I think, with Laravel 11 coming out very shortly or by the time you're hearing this, it'll be out. So, you know, I'm I'm look really looking forward to digging down into the new features in Laravel 11 and and the simplicity, that it will afford with, just all that craft that's been taken away.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Nigel James:Yeah. So super simple config, just composer install, you know, whatever whatever. You're off and running your way to the races.
Mitchell Davis:I'm a bit nervous about it, to be honest with you, the new skeleton. Because we change stuff. Like, we, yeah, we Oh, okay. We're not, like, crazy with it. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:I have, like, a lot of changes in our, like, our different console in our h Right. Kernel. Yeah. Yeah. We get in to mess around with middleware.
Mitchell Davis:We don't really change configs so that I'm not too worried about. But, yeah, I'm really interested to see, like, k. We, show ourselves in the foot here now with this new change. But I know that the underlying goal of this was to make it easier for new people to get into Laravel, and this will undoubtedly do that, the the skeleton changes that it connects. So that's it.
Nigel James:I think so. And and from what I what, Taylor was saying the other day that, you know, it won't break an existing project. It it's been work to work with, you know, both ways, but, obviously, you know, for a new project, it'll look simpler. So That's right. And I really applaud Taylor for that approach.
Nigel James:Let you know, the whole Laravel approach is let's make this simple for someone who knows nothing, and let's make it really approachable. You know? Rust has got its advantages, but, boy, is that learning curve steep. You know? Sure.
Nigel James:Yeah. Which is you're coming from a you know, it's low level, but, you know, I've been reading some of this stuff, and it's, well, oh, yeah. That's how your computer works, which I think is is great too. Great to know that level if you're a masochist, perhaps. But, you know, if you wanted just to build a SaaS system, give Laravel a go, and and, you know, you've got, batteries included, box and dice, all all the great metaphors and words that we can come up to explain.
Mitchell Davis:That's it. It's all there.
Nigel James:Everything that's all there for you. So, yeah, that that's that's my final word.
Mitchell Davis:Beautiful. Well, thank you, Nigel. Where could people find you online?
Nigel James:So the new pinkery. Pinkery.com. So pinkery.com@njames.
Mitchell Davis:N James. Perfect.
Nigel James:Where you'll find me, and, obviously, there's stacks of links there to LinkedIn and Twitter and and all the other crazy places I inhabit on the Internet.
Mitchell Davis:That's nice. Perfect. I'll make sure everything's linked in the show notes. I wanna thank you so much for coming on and chatting with us about enterprise software. Thank you, Nigel.
Nigel James:Really fun. Cool. Have a great day. Cheers.