An Industrial Designer Turned Laravel Dev: The Artisan of the Day Is Morten Harders.
Morten Harders is a Senior Web Developer at Indexed, specializing in backend development, architecture, and developer experience. His journey into professional development came with a nudge from home: it took his wife's encouragement to turn a 20-year hobby into a career.
The Career Switch
"I think I was 12 when I wrote my first line of code. It has been a hobby ever since," Morten explains. But despite two decades of coding experience, he was working in an entirely different field, designing "corona and plasma treating machines for the plastic printing industry."
The career change happened 11 years ago when he moved in with his wife. "I had trouble finding a job", he recalls. "She just asked, ‘Why not make your hobby your job?’ I was struggling to find one within my previous field, and it just clicked, like, we're going to do this."
Laravel Experience
Morten's first experience with Laravel took place at his previous job, building software for a logistics company. "I hadn't used Laravel until then, but once I started using it, it's just perfect. I start every single new project with composer create-project laravel/laravel."
Laravel Live Denmark 2025 was his first Laravel conference of any type. "I've always known the Laravel community is great. I've been following along on GitHub for a long time," he says. "Everybody's just helpful. Everybody wants everybody to succeed and just get things working."
Building Bespoke Solutions
At Indexed, Morten works on custom applications across various industries. "It's mostly bespoke applications. It could be a restaurant application, inventory management, product data management, whatever the customer really needs," he explains.
His experience with clients reflects a universal truth in development: "No client can ever tell exactly what they want. So whenever you get a specification for something, you can implement it to the full specification, but there will always be something."
While they have been using Statamic for a while, the agency is relatively new to Laravel in production, though they would like to adopt more Laravel tools. "We are pushing to at least get Nightwatch in, so I don't have to build the tooling for that functionality again."
Morten has been using PhpStorm for about 10 years and appreciates recent developments: "And now with the Laravel Idea being free, it’s a boost."
Diving into the Source Code
His advice to new Laravel developers comes from a deep exploration of the framework: "The docs are pretty comprehensive. If you ever wonder if any part of the Laravel framework has a specific feature, dive into the source code and see what it can do. There are a lot of hidden gems there."
Your Story Belongs Here
You don't need to have a course, a talk, or a big launch. If Laravel has been part of your journey (a pivot, a side project, a moment of growth), we'd love to hear about it!
Answer Taylor's questions at laravel.com/stories.
We're always looking to feature developers from every corner of the community. Beginners, builders, behind-the-scenes folks. If Laravel helped you do something you're proud of, that's a story worth telling.