Is PHP dead? Absolutely not. Laravel (83K+ stars) is the undisputed industry leader. Its $57M Series A raise in 2024 proved it’s here to stay, cementing its status for one simple reason: Speed. It lets you ship complex apps faster and happier. The market agrees. Senior salaries are hitting $120K+, and giants like Pfizer and the BBC rely on it. But between serverless deployment (Vapor), real-time broadcasting (Reverb), and high-performance concurrency (Octane), the ecosystem is huge. Where to s

When Class Central covered the Coursera-Udemy merger completion, Hugo Sarrazin’s role was unclear. Not anymore. He’s joining Avalara, a tax and compliance company, as CEO. Here’s the thing. Neither an SEC filing nor a public post announced the departure of the 14-month CEO, which led Udemy to its first profitable year and the $2.5 billion all-stock merger. The Quiet Exit The Coursera-Udemy merger was completed on May 11, 2026. Coursera even released a completion 8-K once it was done. Sarrazin,

“Andrew is literally the only person that both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have worked for. He is going to come up with things that nobody else can come up with.” “We don’t know exactly what those inventions and innovations will look like yet, but I’m highly confident that he is uniquely positioned to come up with things that we wouldn’t have come up with on our own.” That’s Greg Hart, Coursera’s CEO, on the July 29 earnings call, the first one since the Udemy merger, explaining why Coursera p

This afternoon, Coursera reports its first quarterly earnings since the Udemy deal closed. Yesterday, it announced a $100 million investment in LearnVector, a new AI learning company founded by Andrew Ng. LearnVector’s domain was registered exactly one month ago and somehow it’s worth $300M? It’s a single page website with five open roles in Mountain View, and a promise of a first product in early 2027. Its founder is the co-founder of Coursera and the chairman of its board. If my reading of t

Online course platforms closely track their learners. And things have gotten worse over the past two years.

The first time you see Tailwind CSS, you might wonder whether someone accidentally pasted their stylesheet into the HTML. A single button can have a dozen classes just to control its spacing, colors, rounded corners, and hover effects. Are we really supposed to write all that? Each class does a small, specific job. Once you recognize them, you can style an element right where you’re building it, without jumping between files or thinking up another class name. The HTML gets busier, but making c