The Venture Center, an entrepreneurial support organization, relaunched its speaker series, now called VCInnovate, with an event Wednesday, Sept. 11. The conversation featured Arkansas-based software developer and creator of Laravel, Taylor Otwell.
Otwell created Laravel, the open-source PHP framework used worldwide by millions of developers.
The night drew an audience of around 40 entrepreneurs, innovators and community leaders to the Venture Center’s office in downtown Little Rock. Arthur Orduña, the Venture Center’s executive director, kicked off the event. Viktoria Capek, the center’s communications and community engagement manager, moderated the conversation with Otwell. This was followed by an audience Q&A.
Audience members asked Otwell about Laravel’s growth and his outlook on the role of artificial intelligence in software development.
He said AI has created a “before-and-after” moment for developers and is a powerful tool for debugging code and handling repetitive tasks that used to slow down the development process.
“At Laravel, we’re exploring how AI can move beyond snippets of code to generating full applications from simple prompts,” Otwell said. “While today it’s great for smaller apps, I believe it won’t be long before it powers business-critical software too.”
The next VCInnovate event will take place in late fall. More details about the keynote speaker at that event will be announced soon.
Photo above: Taylor Otwell of Laravel speaks at the Venture Center’s VCInnovate series. (Photo by Alex Hardgrave)
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