Why Standardization Matters. The Artisan of the Day Is Sigurd Hansen.
Sigurd Jervelund Hansen is the CTO of Eupry, a Danish hardware-enabled SaaS company providing temperature monitoring services for pharmaceutical companies.
Sigurd holds a Master of Science in Computer Science and Engineering from DTU, where he also worked as a Teaching Assistant for Applied Cryptography. But his coding journey started much earlier. He's been building with PHP since he was 13, and hasn’t stopped since.
The Challenge of Custom Frameworks
Founded by a team of students from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in 2012, Eupry was originally started as a collaborative project between UNICEF and DTU. With 70 people total and 15 on the tech team, the company has built something unique: while competitors sell hardware and leave calibration reminders to customers, Eupry built an entire stack that automatically handles sensor calibration and ships new ones.
Ten years after starting Eupry with fellow DTU students, Sigurd's custom PHP approach served the company well in the early days but revealed scaling challenges as the team grew. "I just ended up using plain PHP. It's been built in the way that it works in my brain, and now I find it difficult to find people whose brain works in the same way," he explains.
Like many successful startups, Eupry prioritized speed to market: "It's always been this kind of startup thing of ‘how do we do something in 10 minutes?’ So it hasn't been like ‘how do we evaluate and find a good framework’ because it's always been next thing, next thing, next thing."
This approach helped them build a thriving business, but as Sigurd reflects, "We have 10 years of legacy now, instead of having just two years that we can easily switch." Looking back, he believes they "would have a way more solid foundation" if they had chosen a framework earlier in their journey.
Why Laravel Makes Sense Now
Eupry is transitioning everything to Laravel for one key reason: hiring. "That's one of the benefits that we're looking for, so it's easier to find people who can easily go in and change things, and everything is just in the place where they expect it to be."
The framework's familiarity extends beyond Laravel developers. “One of our developers had some PHP experience, but several years of experience writing .NET when he was hired. But because so many things translate well, it's been easy for him to pick up Laravel: the model-view-controller structure is similar, Entity Framework vs. Eloquent, migrations, seeders, etc.”
Exploring the Ecosystem
We interviewed Sigurd at his first Laravel conference, at Laravel Live Denmark, where he was discovering the broader Laravel ecosystem. After talking with the Laravel Cloud team, he says, "It seems like some of the problems that we have to solve ourselves now would be provided out of the box." They're also trying Nightwatch, which "seems to slot in quite well with some of the things you just get out of the box."
Advice for Other Devs
Sigurd's advice to new developers reflects his experience: don’t reinvent the wheel, “especially when there are so many nice wheels out there,” including free tools with great documentation and a large user base.
"There are so many products and projects that give you common features out of the box. So instead of trying to make your own test framework, use Pest. Instead of creating your own database wrapper, consider using some of the existing ones. Developers who join your project later on, they're going to know exactly how this works."
Sometimes the best lessons come from doing things the hard way first.
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