Наталя ХандусенкоHot News
20 July 2026, 13:40
2026-07-20
The developer created a unique community portal for Laravel specialists in Ukraine: vacancies, companies, tests and events in one place
Lead Laravel Developer & Tech Lead Oleksiy Babintsev decided to remedy the situation with the weak representation of the most popular PHP framework in Ukraine and launched a project — Laravel Ukraine. What started as a small group on LinkedIn, in less than a year turned into a full-fledged portal for developers, which in the first weeks of operation gathered hundreds of users and attracted active attention from the community.
Lead Laravel Developer & Tech Lead Oleksiy Babintsev decided to remedy the situation with the weak representation of the most popular PHP framework in Ukraine and launched a project — Laravel Ukraine. What started as a small group on LinkedIn, in less than a year turned into a full-fledged portal for developers, which in the first weeks of operation gathered hundreds of users and attracted active attention from the community.
From a LinkedIn group to a large web portal: how the idea was born
Laravel is the most popular PHP framework in the world with a strong global community and regular conferences, but its popularity in Ukraine has remained low for a long time. Seeing this gap, about eight months ago, Oleksiy Babintsev created a thematic group on LinkedIn to publish news, code snippets, and useful tips. When the number of community members exceeded 700 people, in early 2026, the developer thought about creating a small blog.
However, during the development process, the scale of the project quickly outgrew the initial idea. The blog transformed into a full-fledged central platform for the Ukrainian Laravel community.
In early 2026, I started thinking about the further development of the group and the direction in general. I decided that the logical step would be to create a website — especially since there was nothing like it in Ukraine. At first, it was supposed to be a small blog with articles, but during the development more and more ideas appeared, and eventually the blog turned into a full-fledged portal of the Laravel community in Ukraine — with vacancies, companies, tests, interview questions, events, etc.
Considering the use of a registered trademark, Oleksiy approached the matter responsibly and officially submitted a request to Laravel in accordance with their trademark policy, and is currently awaiting a response regarding the use of the name.
Laravel Ukraine
Laravel Ukraine is the central platform for the Ukrainian Laravel developer community: news and tutorials, vacancies, companies, interview preparation, tests, events, and conference videos in one place.
The platform contains over 10 active sections. The main features of the portal include:
Blog and Packages: current articles, tutorials, ecosystem news, and a structured catalog of Laravel packages by category.
Job board and Company Directory: a database of current vacancies for developers with an automatic deadline tracking system and a directory of companies that work with this framework.
Tests and Interview Preparation : online testing of various levels of difficulty to test knowledge.
Events and Archive: a calendar of conferences and meetups with integration with Google Calendar and iCal, as well as an archive of about 450 video presentations from Laracon conferences.
Projects: an opportunity for Ukrainian developers to add their own Laravel projects for free for further promotion on the platform's social networks.
Technically, the site is a demonstration of the capabilities of the framework itself. It is written on the basis of a modern stack: PHP 8.5, Laravel, PostgreSQL, Livewire for interactivity, Filament for administration, TailwindCSS + Alpine.js on the frontend, as well as Meilisearch for implementing full-text search. New materials from the site are automatically broadcast to Telegram, LinkedIn and X.
First results
The official release of the platform took place on June 24. During the first three weeks of operation, 115 users registered on the site, 110 articles, 200 packages, 160 companies, and about 160 vacancies appeared, some of which have already been successfully closed.
According to Google Analytics, in the first month, the portal was visited by over 700 unique users with an average engagement time of over 4 minutes. The geography of visitors covers the largest cities of Ukraine: Kyiv, Lviv, Dnipro, Odessa, Zaporizhia, Kharkiv and Ivano-Frankivsk. Moreover, despite the fact that the site is not yet fully indexed, it has already taken first place in Google for the target query "Laravel Ukraine".
One-stop development, the role of AI and the financial side
Alexey Babintsev has 19 years of professional experience in development. He started his career as a programmer at a metallurgical plant in Mariupol, later moved to web development, and for the last 7 years has specialized in Laravel. After moving to Kyiv due to the full-scale war, Alexey works as a Tech Lead at NEXA (supporting the Speedfit fitness club network).
Oleksiy created the entire Laravel Ukraine project on his own, acting simultaneously as an architect, front-end developer, back-end developer, devops developer, SEO specialist, and content author.
"I've already received several offers from developers to join the project development - for now I'm doing it myself, but the very fact of such interest is nice and shows that the community needs the project," added Oleksiy.
Artificial intelligence played an important role in accelerating processes — the Claude Code (Opus model) and ChatGPT tools. According to Oleksiy, he treats AI as a junior developer: he uses it to write routine code (especially in the frontend), edit texts, and SEO, but strictly controls quality through code reviews.
Currently, the project is funded solely from the founder's personal funds, and monthly costs for hosting, AI, and domains are about $100. There are no direct marketing costs — all traffic is organic.
There is currently no monetization on the site. In the future, it is planned to introduce affiliate materials or boost vacancies, but Oleksiy fundamentally refuses to advertise casinos (igaming) or other irrelevant topics. Instead, the priority will be to promote collections for the Armed Forces of Ukraine from verified funds.
Future plans of the developer
In the near future, the site will feature an interactive "Community Map" to visualize developers by geography and the ability to upload resumes. Oleksiy also writes a series of technical articles about the architectural solutions of the laravelukraine.com site itself.
In the long term (in six months or a year), the developer plans to launch specialized courses, a certification system, his own podcast, and hold a large-scale Ukrainian conference dedicated to the Laravel ecosystem. Although Oleksiy is currently managing the process himself, the platform already has open functionality so that the community can independently fill the site with content and vacancies.
