Simon Vrachliotis Series

Frontend Mentor Challenge with Laravel

In this series, we take a Frontend Mentor challenge and build it using Laravel and Tailwind CSS. Rather than chasing pixel-perfect replication, the focus is on pragmatic Laravel and backend logic. Along the way, we explore carts, session state, semantic markup, and UI polish.

Running Clock

With Simon Vrachliotis

Welcome to "Running Clock," my new interview series where I fire off questions to top developers about their favorite tools, frameworks, and coding obsessions. The catch? We only have five minutes to get through all of my questions...and the clock is ticking!

Motion For The Web

With Simon Vrachliotis

Master the art of modern web animation, from subtle CSS transitions to full-blown JavaScript motion systems. This series starts with the fundamentals of smooth, accessible CSS motion, then builds through keyframes, scroll-linked animations, SVG techniques, and the Web Animations API, finishing with powerhouse libraries like Motion.dev, AnimeJS, and GSAP.

React, The Laravel Way

With Simon Vrachliotis

In "React from Scratch", we built a "DevPups" app from scratch. Now it's time to take things further. Using that finished app as a base, you'll learn how to construct a React-powered app...the Laravel way! You'll see how we can swap out fragile external API calls for Laravel's elegant backend, add real-time "like" functionality, support file uploads, and polish up our CRUD features with proper authorization. Along the way, you'll get comfortable with Inertia.js, the perfect glue between Laravel's backend strength and React's frontend flexibility. By the end of this series, you'll have constructed a production-ready app that shows the Laravel way of working with React: fewer moving parts, cleaner architecture, and faster development.

shadcn/ui Deconstructed

With Simon Vrachliotis

Shadcn/ui is not only great for building beautiful user interfaces, but it’s also an excellent way to learn coding patterns and techniques to build a robust set of UI components or a design system. In this series, we will reverse-engineer the code generated by shadcn/ui to explore various composition patterns and styling techniques.

React from Scratch

With Simon Vrachliotis

React from Scratch is a hands-on, beginner-friendly video series that takes you from an empty folder to a fully interactive React app — no prior React knowledge required. You'll learn about JSX, components, state management, controlled inputs, data fetching, and even TypeScript!I hope you'll come to appreciate React for what it truly is: a flexible, powerful UI library — not a full-blown framework. I'll teach you where its boundaries lie, and how to scale beyond them.