Building a CRM with Laravel and Livewire: Lessons Learned Over Five Months as a Solo Developer
Embarking on the journey to create an open-source Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system from scratch has been a rewarding and insightful experience. Over the past five months, working entirely solo, I delved into many challenges and triumphs that offer valuable lessons for developers interested in similar projects. Here’s a comprehensive overview of what I discovered along the way.
What Worked Well
One of the standout tools that accelerated development was Filament, an incredible admin panel framework. Tasks that I initially believed would take weeks were completed in mere days, thanks to Filament’s streamlined interface and functionalities.
Moreover, leveraging Laravel combined with Livewire proved to be an ideal stack for a solo developer. This combination eliminates the need for complex API and frontend separation, enabling seamless, reactive interfaces within a unified codebase. It made building interactive features more straightforward and faster.
Writing modern PHP also turned out to be more enjoyable than anticipated. With a codebase where approximately 99.6% of the code was explicitly typed and leveraging PHPStan Level 7, I achieved a high level of code quality and early bug detection, saving time down the line.
Challenges Faced and How I Tackled Them
While developing, I encountered unexpected hurdles. Handling custom fields, which seemed simple initially, became a performance bottleneck when supporting over 50 fields per record. Page load times escalated from 250 milliseconds to about two seconds. The solution involved optimizing data fetching through improved eager loading strategies and implementing more aggressive caching mechanisms.
Designing a system intended for “everyone” proved to be impractical; it turned out that building universally meant diluting the focus. Instead, I tailored the CRM to small teams, ensuring that features were relevant and manageable.
Open source development also means more than just releasing code—I realized that maintaining and iterating on the project takes significant time and dedication. The community’s interest and contributions are what make open-source projects thrive, but this commitment shouldn’t be underestimated.
Valuable Tech Strategies
Sticking closely to Laravel’s conventions—despite being perceived as dull—proved to be a smart move. It accelerated development and made the code more maintainable.
Integrating PHPStan from day one proved invaluable. It identified bugs early, reducing debugging time and increasing confidence in the codebase.
Choosing Filament over building an admin panel from scratch saved countless development hours and
