Most of us are surely familiar with the phrase, “Lost in translation.” But if not, it generally refers to words or concepts that lose their meaning or subtlety when translated from one language to another.

The same is also true when “translating” or parsing educational content. I’m instantly reminded of sitting in my ninth grade class, listening to the teacher inform me what Shakespeare intended to convey when he wrote that particular paragraph four hundred years ago. “Here’s what he meant,” she would say. And even at that age, I found myself thinking, “Is this actually what he meant, or is this your best attempt at guessing what he might have maybe, possibly meant? And how often was it the case that he meant nothing of the sort?”

The point is: things get lost the further you travel from the source. I can teach you about Laravel, but no one will ever understand it as deeply as its creator, Taylor Otwell, who wrote those original lines back in 2012. It’s easy to learn what a piece of code does. But it’s far more difficult to grasp why it does so.

With that in mind, today, I’m proud to announce a special new category of series here at Laracasts: CreatorSeries.

Why learn a tool second-hand, when you can instead be taught by the very person who created it? CreatorSeries provide deep-dives into technologies, as presented by their original creators.

Okay, admittedly, it’s a very simple premise: find the person who made… that thing, and have them teach you directly how to use… that thing! So simple, and yet quite rare in the programming space. It’s not so surprising when you think about it. There’s no mystery black box here.

Programming and teaching require completely different skillsets.

And more often than not - from my experiences - they rarely overlap. But rare does not mean never. The best developers I’ve had the pleasure of knowing are often able to somehow magically do both.

For the last several months, I’ve been searching for those very people, and doing my best to remove whatever roadblocks might be preventing them from teaching you directly. You can probably guess what those roadblocks are. Sometimes, it’s nothing more than a microphone recommendation. In other cases, money is of course the issue. But in most situations, time is the hurdle. “I’d love to do this,” they might say, “but I’m constantly in battle with time.”

I won’t tell you that every person I reached out to came through for us. But the ones who did created something special. I can’t wait to share these new CreatorSeries with you. We'll be releasing one per month.

Learn How to Build Livewire

First up is "Livewire Uncovered," from one of my favorite developers in the Laravel space: Caleb Porzio. You know him as the creator of Livewire and Alpine.js. I know him as a natural and masterful teacher.

I reached out to Caleb many months ago about the possibility of doing an advanced deep-dive into Livewire. We’ve already covered the basics of Livewire at Laracasts. What I personally wanted to see is how one would go about creating Livewire from scratch. Livewire echoes magic in the best possible way. …And I wanted to learn the magician’s secrets to share it with all of you.

Caleb agreed. And it’s now ready to watch in its entirety.

This is only the first of many CreatorSeries that we currently have in development. We'll discuss other courses in the near future, but until then, sit back, kick up your feet, and learn how to build Livewire.