Recently Samantha Quinones started out a new project with Laravel to find out more about this popular framework. In her latest post she shares some of her first impressions of working the initial steps of her application.

I was super excited when I found a couple of free hours to finally sit down with Laravel and kick off my little blog project. That two hour time box turned out to be pretty important to this effort. [...] I won’t go in to details on a topic as well-trod as that, but I think it speaks extremely highly of Laravel’s approachability that I was able to build out a reasonably rich authentication system in a little more than an hour, including command-line tools to provision and manage users.

She also talks some about some of the things she "wasn't quite comfortable with" like the framework's use of facades. She mentions a post from Taylor Otwell to help explain some of the non-facade methods and suggests that if some of this and the "magic" with the dependency injection container were mentioned in the documentation, the framework might receive a bit less criticism for them.