Tony Lea

Tony Lea is an American web developer and designer best known as the founder of DevDojo, a developer community and product studio, and as the creator of popular Laravel open-source projects including the Voyager admin panel and the Wave SaaS starter kit. Lea lives in Southwest Florida.

Lea grew up in Oregon, moved to Southern California after college and later relocated to Florida. He has been publishing Laravel tutorials since the framework's early days; his YouTube videos on Laravel 4 authentication date to around 2013. Through DevDojo he built a mix of tutorials, courses, ebooks and tools aimed at people who build with Laravel, Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js.

His best-known open-source release is Voyager, a Laravel admin panel and BREAD (browse, read, edit, add, delete) builder launched in 2016 that gathered more than 11,000 GitHub stars. In 2021 he released Wave, an open-source Laravel starter kit that handles authentication, subscriptions, teams and an admin area, with around 6,500 stars. DevDojo followed with Tails, a drag-and-drop Tailwind page builder, Pines, a library of copy-and-paste Alpine and Tailwind UI components (2023), the Genesis starter kit and DevDojo Sites.

Lea's work brought him close to the core Laravel team. In 2025 the Laravel blog described him as an open-source engineer at Laravel when it launched the new official starter kits, for which he created the community starter-kit directory, and he wrote up the Laracon 2025 keynote. His own site and X bio in late 2026 present him as running DevDojo and building new products, including Max AI Builder, an AI tool for making sites, forms and games, MySmartTour, self-guided apartment tours for leasing teams, and the Katana UI component library.

Lea represents a long-running kind of indie maker: a developer-educator who turns free open-source tools and tutorials into an audience, then layers paid products and services on top.