Christoph Rumpel has posted a recap of his experience at Laracon EU talking about chatbots and some details on the chatbot he created for the event.

For my book and video-course about building chatbots in PHP I created the Laracon EU conference chatbot. In this article, I will give you all the insights into this project.

On the 12th of July this year, I released my first ebook/video-course called Build Chatbots with PHP. In the last chapter, you can follow me as I create a chatbot for a real client: The Laracon EU conference chatbot. A chatbot that was made to provide information about the Laracon EU conference on <a href="https://m.me/laraconeu>Facebook and Telegram. This article is about my learnings of this projects.

He starts off by talking about the desire to "be real" with his example and how abstract examples, while helpful in the short term, don't provide much value past that. He created the course with this in mind, providing a real-world example to show users the ins and outs of chatbots. He also suggests not messing up the first implementation and points out that chatbots work great with events. He covers some of the features of the bot and how he worked around some differences between the two social media services. He ends the post with some statistics of the users of the bot and the feedback he received.

The Laravel News site has published an interview with one of the speakers for the upcoming Laracon EU Conference, happening at the end of this month (August 2016). In the interview they talk with well-known Laravel-er Freek Van der Herten.

This year’s Laracon EU has a fantastic speaker lineup including twenty-two speakers from all across the world. Tickets are still available and it’s one you will not want to miss.

Freek Van der Herten (@freekmurze) is one of those speakers and he graciously took a break from releasing new packages to allow me the opportunity to ask him a few questions about his talk and the conference experience.

Freek answers questions about his previous experience at Laracon EU, his Laravel-related backup package, other talks he's excited about and words of encouragement to those attending the conference. Check out the full post for his answers to these and other questions.

On the Laravel News site today there's an announcement posted about the launch of the Laracon 2015 conference websites for both editions, in the United States and in Europe.

Today both the Laracon.us and Laracon.eu conference sites have been launched. Both sharing the same style of branding and logo. The US conference will be held in Kentucky on August 11-12, and the EU in Amsterdam on August 25-26. Early bird pricing is available for both and the speaker lineup will be announced at a later time.

The Early Bird tickets for each even come in at just a bit over $300 USD and no schedules have been posted, but that's a great price for either of these two-day events. Each site also has links to subscribe to a mailing list related to the event so you can get the latest updates as they're released.