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

This talk was just what I needed to motivate me to install xdebug everywhere I develop, ASAP. Having come to PHP from a C background, I've been hurting for a debugger but just never bothered to spend the time learning about the capabilities of available packages.

Derick did a great job of highlighting the more useful-looking and impressive features of xdebug and I will be a devoted user of the package from now on.

One mildly distracting aspect of the talk was the trouble with KCacheGrind's UI. Derick handled it gracefully, though, so overall it didn't really detract. But maybe slides would work just as well in the future?

Absolutely the best explanation of MVC I've heard. I started getting a little fuzzy on some of the later stuff -- maybe because my OO is weak -- but I think some of the examples could be strengthened also.

The Iterator example comes to mind -- it basically replicates existing PHP functionality. That may end up making the example less helpful because it leaves some in the audience wondering, "why would I ever need an Iterator"? An example showing something you can't already do with next() might be more helpful. Or then again it might just be more confusing...

Love the fun examples, though. Using "son", "daughter", and "wife" makes code much easier to grok than using "foo", "bar", and "baz", at least for me.

Best. Talk. Ever.

Actually I have now way of knowing that because this was my first conference ever. But I will go to *any* conference in the future where Cal is speaking, and I would listen to this talk again if it was presented.

Cal took great pains to point out that this was a talk for beginners, but I have been writing PHP code for over 3 years, read/follow some of the big blogs and twitter feeds, and spread a bit of misinformation on php-general from time to time, and I thought this was still the most interesting and helpful talk of the day.

I think it's exactly the sort of back-to-basics stuff that everyone can benefit from reviewing, no matter where they are in their careers or how involved they are in the community.

Plus Cal's a blast to listen to. Perfect for the right-after-lunch slot.

The material was helpful but there was an awful lot of "I haven't looked at these slides for a year". Appreciate that Ben was up-front about that but eventually I started to drift.

I also found the talk a little heavy on implementation details and would have enjoyed hearing more high-level "philosophy of caching" material -- why to cache, when to cache, when not to cache, etc.

Ben delivered another high quality talk on memchached -- a great introduction on using memcached with a lot of practical information. Very well structured and articulate presentation, easy to understand even if you did not have any exposure to memcached before, yet enough material to keep you interested even if you are fairly familiar with it already.

sorry posting my comments in few windows simultaneously, so obviously mixed them up, please disregard my comment on design patterns.

This was an interesting exercise in reviewing some of the "pearls" in various open source projects. It would be much more interesting and useful, though, if presenters would give a little bit more insight in the train of thought that goes into the code review process and maybe present some examples that can show audience some traits to avoid (and why -- performance, security, reliability etc.) and some other traits to acquire.

Would make it much more fruitful experience, so members of audience can leave the presentation having learned something instead of just looking at what stupid things other people have done. For that we all have enough humiliation reviewing our own code from some time ago :-)

This presentation was arguable the culmination of CodeWorks. Clever and witty talk about what PHP is and what it isn't. Every developer who aspires to be somebody in the PHP world should listen to this.

Also, great community building, thanks a lot for helping promote the local PHP groups, including the http://laphp.org/

Great presentation, one of the most concise intro to design patterns in 60 minutes I've ever heard.

Ben did a great job describing the intricacies of implementing AtomPub with great examples. This presentation can also serve as a great intro to REST and building the RESTful service in general.