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Mistakes I Made Learning Laravel: So You Don't Have To

Ten real Laravel mistakes — fat controllers, N+1 queries, skipping Form Requests, ignoring queues, hardcoding URLs — with the wrong code and the corrected...

Published 2026-03-15 by Aditya Mandal.

Mistakes I Made Learning Laravel: So You Don't Have To When I first picked up Laravel, I was coming from a world of vanilla PHP and scattered include statements. Laravel felt like magic — routes that just worked, a database layer that practically wrote itself, and a templating engine that made my old echo-based pages look prehistoric. I shipped my first feature in an afternoon and thought I had cracked it. I hadn't. I had merely scratched the surface, and the code I was so proud of that day would make me wince a year later. The truth is, Laravel's elegance is a double-edged sword. It makes the easy things trivial, which means you can build something that works long before you understand why it works or how it should scale. I learned most of what I know by doing things the wrong way first — fat controllers that became unmaintainable, queries that fired a hundred times in a single page load, validation logic duplicated across a dozen methods, and hardcoded URLs that broke the moment I moved to production. Each of those mistakes cost me a late night and a hard lesson. This article is the honest retrospective I wish I'd had when I started. I'm going to walk through ten concrete mistakes I made while learning Laravel, show you the exact wrong code I wrote, explain why it bit me, and give you the corrected version I use today. If you're early in your Laravel journey, this should save you the debugging sessions I had to endure. If you're further along, you'll probably recognize a few of these — and hopefully nod, not cringe, because you've already fixed them. Putting Business Logic in Controllers Instead of Services For the first six months, my controllers did everything. They validated input, talked to the database, sent emails, charged Stripe, and formatted responses. When a

https://adityamandal.dev/blog/mistakes-i-made-learning-laravel/