This talk was given at Laracon EU 2015. Visit http://laracon.eu/2015 for more talks. Software development is riddled with explicit and implicit costs. Every decision you make has a cost attached to it. When you're writing code, you're making an investment, the size of which will for a long time define the costs of your future growth. In this talk you will learn how to see, understand and game some of these forces in your favor.