CodeWorks 2009 (Los Angeles)
24 - 25 Sep 2009 at Los Angeles, CA

Jason,

Thanks for the talk. I enjoyed it and thought it was good overall. Definitely one of my favorites during the conference. One thing I would have liked to see is more of a "day in the life" type approach to some of the coding samples.

In the week or so since I've caught this presentation, I've implemented every tool into the web2project development process, some for ongoing analysis, some for general metrics.

The documentation/info for pdepend is lacking - including how to read the graphs - but the rest are pretty good.

Picking apart examples is pretty easy but I agree that looking at the *process* and strategy behind a Code Review would be incredibly powerful. Further, when the trio were reworking group-provided live code, this is an even better presentation.

Enjoyed the talk, even though there wasn't really much I hadn't already known, it is invaluable to hear the development process of some of the best coders around. Especially useful was hearing Derick's approach to Test Driven Development.

This was a very busy time for me to attend a conference, but not knowing what to expect coming in, two guys sold me on clearing my schedule to attend.

One is Sebastien Bergmann and the other Derick Rethans. Both PHPUnit and Xdebug have improved my projects quite a lot. And Xdebug helped me step through what the Zend Framework's Front Controller et. al. really does.

I was shocked that so few people in the audience (and among those I've spoken to) make regular use of Xdebug. Sure, print_r is great, but there's something about following the flow of a program that takes your understanding to a new level. Especially if you're integrating your code into a large application.

This talk was one of the highlights of the conference for me.

Cal, don't you know you can't convey that many design patterns in an hour ;) Actually, that's what I'd have thought..and you shouldn't be able to, but Cal really managed to get through some difficult concepts on an important topic.

PHP 5's turn to OOP is a pivotal moment in the life of PHP. Key to not losing procedural PHP programmers as we complete this shift (which is far from done, ask @CaseySoftware for the figures), is explaining to them design patterns. Nice way to close out the conference.

I loved this talk and really appreciated his strong plugs for our LAPHP group. He is right, if you aren't involved in your community, you are missing out on something that can help your career tremendously. (e.g. I've hired former speakers for projects and referred many people for jobs or directed them to resources for learning more.)

Cal is the best natural speaker on the tour. Booming voice, very sharp guy but unlike top people in their field usually are (and Cal is tops), he does not have the tpe of personality that would intimidate beginners. That is so key to giving your audience the most benefit of your knowledge.

Great job Cal.

BTW, check out the review I'm about to do on Cal's Design Patterns talk.

On the positive side, I enjoyed seeing Sebastian Bergmann's phploc tool. It really showed at a glance the cost as well as the audaciousness of the CakePHP project to try and make up for PHP 4's lack of OOP.

80mg of memory to say Hello World is a lot, and I wouldn't start to use CakePHP until they support php 5.3+, especially after seeing this code review... but bravo to Nate for starting such an interesting project and on the success they've had.

On the downside, it was kind of like having Wayne Gretzky, Roger Federer & Babe Ruth on stage cherry picking to criticize, the worst games that high school players of their sport played...

Federer on how Rafa Nadal can improve = fascinating. But Wayne Gretzky on how a minor leaguer with bad technique sucks, not so much.

As Oleg was pretty much saying, I'd like to have seen this top notch team of coders take mediocre code or even good code and show how they would approach it to make it awesome code.

Not sure if he mentioned it, because I walked in a tad late, but something the audience probably didn't realize is that Ben was asked to cover a hole in the schedule, so it wasn't his fault that he hadn't looked at the slides in a year. I can imagine not knowing that might make an audience member question why a speaker would arrive unprepared and it could affect the reception of the presentation...

I really liked the talk and learned a thing or two about memcached.

Great talk. Arne knew his stuff. I especially enjoyed seeing the demo form and the process of finding a hole in the form, then slowly pulling out the info you want to get out of the database.

I knew most of the points covered pretty well already, but it was nice to have the review and see an expert cover it in detail. Great anecdotes too.