2015 Madison PHP Meetings
1 Jan - 31 Dec 2015 at Madison College

Good overview of Laravel. I've been using Laravel for about a month to migrate an existing app done in an older framework (Kohana). I'm really impressed with it, and would like to echo your recommendation for Laracasts. Jeffrey Way is really, really good, and his videos are terrific. I think for some (e.g., the uninitiated) the talk might have gone too deeply into the details and code too quickly. It's always hard for a speaker to gauge how much vs. how much breadth to cover. For an intro talk, I might have focused a bit more on Eloquent to show how quickly you can get up and running, and to show the incredible array of built-in methods Laravel has for querying and then handling collections. Add a sprinkling of dependency injection, middleware, and caching, and you have a nice intro presentation, with plenty of time to answer questions and go into some of the other cool features, like queuing, etc. Thanks so much for agreeing to talk with us, and for your tremendous contributions to php!

I have no experience with Laraval and was expecting an overview, but by slide three was already lost. What would have been good to know is how, in general terms, does it function, what is the structure of a common module, how available are modules to add functionality, what sort of templates are available on the general market, etc. These are business questions that need to be answered before committing to using a platform.

The most valuable thing in the presentation was the mention of the other resources and ecosystem, I will definitely look into those.

If I were expecting a more code-level review then that the presentation was great, he's obviously the guy to do it. Only comment for improvemnemt was that some of the slides were completely unreadable.

Awesome talk Taylor. A great overview of the features of Laravel. Thanks also for your contribution to PHP!

- Ken

Thanks for coming to Madison to speak with us! I'm a php newbie and this was pretty advanced for me, but I appreciated how you defined your terminology and recommended other sources, even those you disagreed with.

You walked the line pretty well between being extremely opinionated but without completely throwing the other side under the bus. Great talk but very long. The buggy slides were a hiccup one might expect from the first time giving the talk. The last example of the Mock could use some work; I think that it was indeed *not* a Mock and either the original source was wrong or the porting form Java to PHP missed something. If it turns out that the example is bad (hey, everyone makes mistakes, right?) it might be an interesting thing to be able to show a real example of a Mock and then show, "this is actually what the original author did; see, even *experts* can get it wrong!"

The talk was super long. As an attendee, I find that it isn't so bad if a talk is long if you are expecting that to be the case. Otherwise, I kept wondering, "is it almost done yet?" and as it went past an hour, "how much longer?" I guess I was distracted from the talk simply by wondering when it would be done. That is mostly on me, but hey, it was an interesting position to find myself in given I've given at least one or two "hour too long" talks in the past. :)

Good presentation and discussion.

In order to keep the presentation to 60 minutes, I recommend shortening the "who I am" section. Most people will accept your credentials from the short bio they read prior to the talk.

Focusing on your main points and yet allowing for discussion is challenging. Therefore, keep your personal comments on what the audience is saying to a minimum, IMO.

As someone who doesn't do TDD, this was very insightful. It has given me an excellent frame of reference as I begin exploring the possibilities.

Thank you so much Yitzchok for an incredible talk. I really like how you framed the issues of TDD, and linked it to better design. Your presentation style is excellent, and you promoted deeper understanding through the interaction you had with your audience with the discussion based talk. You have inspired me personally to investigate further the two schools (London/Chicago). I also appreciate your thoughts of starting with Classicist and getting on the road to aspire to be a Mockist. Very thought provoking! Thank you again for taking time out to share your wisdom with us here in Madison!

Thank you. It was an enlightening talk. It gave me a different frame of reference to view some of my co-workers' crazy testing styles.

-- Team Chicago

Great talk on everything from theory to implementation. I would highly recommend this talk to everyone who is interested in unit testing. Thanks -