Aaron Francis

Aaron Francis is a software developer and content creator based in Dallas, Texas. A CPA who started his career as a tax accountant at a Big 4 firm, he moved into software, became well known in the Laravel and PHP community, and built a reputation for clear, high-production technical videos.

With Steve Tenuto he co-founded Try Hard Studios, a technical video production studio, and together they built a database education business. Their High Performance SQLite course reportedly made about $125,000 in its first 30 days, and it was followed by Mastering Postgres, now both offered under the Database School brand. He also sells a course on producing screencasts at screencasting.com.

Francis builds developer tools too, most recently Solo, a desktop app for running and managing all the dev processes of a project, sold with a generous free tier and a paid Pro license. He co-hosts the Mostly Technical podcast and, per his X bio, has also taken on a VP Marketing and Community role at Laravel.