To be professional at anything, you need to acquire knowledge and then act on it.

Where I gather knowledge?

Laracasts - http://laracasts.com/

stackoverflow - https://stackoverflow.com/users/5326191/digvijay

YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/

Where do I apply my knowledge?

Try to work on real-world projects (a lot). Something that will push me to get out of my comfort zone.

Practise

Act on it

Fail

Try again

Give yourself a chance to fail and then another chance to succeed.

You will notice that even Level 50 users on Laracasts ask questions because they understand (from my perspective) that it's very easy to get stagnant in the IT industry. One needs to be naive and keep re-learning as it is the best path to move forward.

Technically? Find someone who pays you to develop something with Laravel for them. That's the definition of "professional".

But I guess you mean a "good" developer?

Exactly as @chaudigv said. Practise and don't get discouraged. Create a hobby project for yourself to see what it's about and what things you can use.

I’ve recently started working back in laravel (after 2 years supporting a legacy client project in symfony). During my time in symfony I spent a lot of time on laracasts and worked very hard last summer with lessons and researching discussion threads to try for best answer.

That got me to level 50 but even so I am still nowhere near being completely expert in laravel (and that’s with being a commercial php developer for 20 years).

The key trigger for me levelling up as a developer wuss learning how to approach writing code from a testing perspective and for all new code to be immediately accompanied by supporting unit and functional tests.

This has also taught me to be more critical of my work but also less precious of it if someone or something better can change and improve it.

I’ve loving that I can apply the knowledge I’ve picked up by contributing to laracasts and also that It’s given me a place to freely ask questions when I’m at the edge of my knowledge.

If you work a lot on your own it’s easy to doubt your own ability (it’s known as ‘imposter syndrome’).

The best way to get more expert is to get yourself a project to build, write some tests and reassess often.

In short:

Time and practice.

Like skill trades, just an example, it takes practice (on the job training) and book learning as well as 4 years for an apprentice electrician to become a journeyman electrician.

Same with programming, time and "the doing" of projects, nothing else will do that for you.

Thanks everyone for the advice. If anyone has experience on how to become better, share

Just do it! :-) I am trying to expand the final project from the Laracasts from Scratch series and I hope it can get picked up, but in the mean time it's making me research for things I wouldn't have research in the first place, and im talking about "common" things you see on the internet, like a Users profile. Cheers!