As someone who came to Laravel from WordPress, I had a massive hole in my abilities to understand larger systems as a whole. During my tenure in WordPress, I actually got pretty good at the web native parts of modern web development but my “backend” skills were mostly about passing arrays around and doing simple database operations. Basic concepts like MVC were totally foreign to me and I was reminded of this a few months ago when I chatted with an old friend about their experiences with Laravel after the drama in WP land a few months back. When I told him that Models were not anything special and you didn’t need to scaffold out a Model using Laravel to create your own class against an existing table, his mind was blown and I could see the gears starting to turn. Mind you, this is a very successful solopreneur with a thriving theme business/platform and over a decade of experience; just that xp was in a domain set apart from the discipline of modern software engineering.
I’m super happy to have spent that time learning how to work with constraints to build absolutely giant systems (had a stint with an agency that worked for big online publishers that are known for using WP…) but after seeing the other side, I’m also happy to be past that and onto different and more interesting things.