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

Frustrated with handling unpaid customer support for a platform with 8.6 million paying subscribers, Duolingo’s Reddit community takes dramatic action against the $16.2 billion language learning company

Swayam is India’s national online course platform, designed to support the country’s National Education Policy, which entails improving access to quality education in India. At Class Central, we’ve been paying attention to Swayam since the very beginning. It launched in beta in 2016, and has now reached over 56 million enrollments with over 5.2 million certificates issued. It’s been growing rather fast. Swayam offers courses in a wide variety of disciplines, including from prestigious institut

On April 9, shareholders of both Coursera and Udemy voted to approve the merger. The votes weren’t close. At Coursera, 99.4% of votes were in favor of issuing new shares to complete the acquisition. At Udemy, 99.9% voted to adopt the merger agreement. Out of more than 228 million shares that voted across both companies, fewer than 500,000 voted against. Coursera shareholders also approved doubling the company’s authorized shares from 300 million to 600 million, which is needed to issue the sto

LinkedIn Learning is offering some free courses and learning paths including free certificates.

Class Central, yet again, came across a 2U employee’s layoff post on LinkedIn. This is its sixth layoff (that we know of) since 2U acquired edX in 2021. The first one happened in 2022 for profitability’s sake. Since then, the company filed for bankruptcy (mostly due to the debt it took to acquire edX for $800M), took down its bootcamps, exited many university partnerships, and even got delisted from the stock market. The previous layoffs were framed as strategy shifts, realigning operations, o