Crafting Code and the Community: The Artisan of the Day Is Harris Raftopoulos.
Harris Raftopoulos turns everyday Laravel friction into clear, usable solutions.
If you build modern Laravel apps and read practical posts about the framework, there is a good chance you have come across Harris Raftopoulos. Harris writes clear, focused tutorials and notes about Laravel, Livewire, collections, and practical developer ergonomics. He is a Senior Software Engineer at Ulobby and a staff writer at Laravel News. He also helps run the local Laravel scene in Greece as a meetup co-organizer.
Harris’s journey is the kind of stubborn pivot that many of us recognize. He came from PHP, WordPress, and CodeIgniter days, and like plenty of developers, he switched to Laravel after watching the right people explain it at the right time. He says Jeffrey Way’s work was one of those turning points that convinced him Laravel was worth the trade. That practical shift stuck.
In his own words, once he moved to Laravel, he never looked back.
What He Builds: Stakeholder Platforms, Backup Verification, and Mobile Experiments
Harris currently works on a stakeholder management and political monitoring platform, doing both backend and frontend work. His main stack centers around Laravel, with Livewire, Vue, Inertia, and Tailwind CSS pulling the UI and interaction pieces together.
He experiments with mobile approaches too, exploring native toolchains to deliver iOS experiences. On the side, he’s built a backup-integrity platform that not only stores backups but verifies them before you ever need to restore. Those are the kinds of projects that find the edge cases most teams miss.
Harris publishes a steady stream of short, actionable posts on his site and Medium about Laravel internals and day-to-day improvements. He blogs at his personal site and writes for Laravel News, where his pieces cover topics such as request input handling, transform helpers, and small but meaningful API changes in recent Laravel releases.
Alongside these shorter notes, Harris also creates long-form, educative content, feature-length videos for Laravel News that go deeper into Laravel’s internals, and detailed walkthroughs on his personal YouTube channel, where he narrates and live-builds solutions. These complement his quick tips by offering in-depth guidance that teams can follow step by step. If you want practical examples of how to make your code cleaner and your team faster, his writing and videos are a reliable place to look.
How His Short Guides Make Your Team Faster and Your Code Safer
Harris favors small, practical improvements over grand pronouncements. His posts are the kind that save you minutes every week and make codebases less fragile. Look for takeaways on collection methods, request handling, and tiny API ergonomics that compound into a much better developer experience. That focus is what turns a list of blog posts into a steady, useful body of work.
He also practices what he preaches about community building. His advice is blunt and useful: keep things simple, start small, write about your work, and be consistent. Don’t host meetups as a checkbox. Do them because you want to give back. If you have limited time, run micro meetups for five people. If you want traction, publish short notes and involve others. That is almost always better than waiting until you have the perfect talk or perfect slide deck.
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!
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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.