Cascadia PHP
14 - 15 Sep 2018 at University Place

Good talk. Nothing really new but a good reminder of where we're at on this topic. I didn't agree with everything but with most things.

Unfortunately, I had to leave abruptly in the middle of the talk but I was totally floored by the half I listened to. I discovered stuff I had no idea were possible and Demin Yin is a very clear and organized presenter, easy to follow. You won't get lost wondering how he jumped from one point to the other. First thing I did after the talk was visiting his and his company's Github repos.

Tons of information. Maybe a little too dense if Regex feels scary to you. But Liam Wiltshire really knows how to keep you interested with a mix of humour and aha moments. I learned 2 or 3 tricks that are really going to come in handy. I also never actually thought about optimizing regex and Liam's approach was great because he really explained how different approaches could radically impact performance. Highly recommended.

This was a very actionable talk as the title suggests. I am not totally comfortable with Composer so I really appreciated that Patrick Schwisow made it easy to follow along. Good talk.

This was not the talk I was expecting. The talk was pretty much just a short overview the business (helpful) and a list of technologies (not helpful). I was expecting "we tried using X but had problems with Y so we switched to Z" and other types of statements. Otherwise the list of technologies sounds pretty similar to everything I already use, so I don't know any reasons why one product shines above another one.

First of all, I don't know Tobias, although we shook hands later on. I liked his talk. It was in-depth and gave a great overview of how a modern application could bootstrap / run. The talk was well prepared and the code examples made sense. He even did live step-through 'debugging' at the end. That went well. In the beginning of the presentation, Tobias started his example with a switch statement. Then multiple libraries / dependencies were added, one after another. With each step I thought, ok, will we now get rid of the switch statement? I think the talk was not really about solving a problem (aka, the switch). It felt more like a reversed showcase of a solution to me. But, nonetheless, it was well presented, well prepared, and just very interesting. Well done!

I agree with David's review: "You could hear a pin drop". Samantha really got the attention from her audience. The talk definitely made me think about mental illness, and how we can be 'an ally' to others. However, I find it very disrespectful to say f***-ing at least 20 times in a talk. Doing so is a choice, a way of presenting. One of Samantha's slides was about RESPECT. Hearing this talk created friction in me, hence the 3/5 score.

I'm seeing this talk gets a lot of positive feedback. That's great. Personally I didn't learn anything nor did I feel empowered in any way. Also, some joke attempts were made, but hardly anyone laughed. I bet it must be difficult to kick off a conference, and to do it in the early morning. It's really courageous. I just don't feel like the talk is worth 5 stars. PS. I don't know Nic personally. I'm sure he's a great guy!

Initially I thought this talk would be about how to refactor legacy applications. I expected code examples and best practices. However that was not the case, and it ended up quite scientific. I think I've forgotten most of it already, which is a shame. However, Adam has great presentation skills, it was just that I expected a different kind of talk.

The talk was well prepared and the slides were good looking and concise. I liked how Andrew categorized the different kinds of community members, how they interact, and how you'd best interact with them. To be honest, I was positively surprised with the contents of his talk.