Haha it's amazing how there's a complete lack of awareness when they _really should_ know better.

My very first Laravel project (about 10 years ago) was a multiplayer, competitive implementation of Conway's Game of Life, where players would get matched up (or could challenge their friends) to play a game of CGoL. Each player had one half of the board and a limited number of pieces that they could place, then I would run the simulation letting "skirmishes" happen where new blocks would be spawned based on the percentage of surrounding blocks owned by each player. At the end of a certain number of generations, the player with the most pieces left on the board was considered the winner.

I also used this project to play around with async processing (using rabbitmq and a python backend for processing the end state to assign points, because you don't trust the client), and a bunch of other "new" (to me) technologies...

So to answer your question, it's probably the time that I turned Lumen into a WordPress theme for a laugh.

If you saw some of the PHP code I've encountered over the years, you too would be shocked.