Day Camp 4 Developers Master Series III
20 Dec 2013 at Online

Code was pretty readable but the presentation style was kind of low energy. Not something that's extremely engaging at 7 am.

Great talk! His books are awesome too!

Excellent talk! Very practical approach, which is nice!

Great talk! I'm not a fan of wordpress, but still a great talk!

Awesome talk!

I haven't done unit testing before and was lost pretty quickly. There were a few times where I thought you were going to explain specific PHPUnit methods but you moved on, stating that we all probably already knew all about it. I only wish that were the case! However, after the other sessions of the day, I have a feeling that your examples will provide the depth that will perfectly compliment the overviews and examples that the other speakers offered. Thank you for your contribution!

I learned quite a bit about PHPUnit and crafting basic unit tests. You did a great job illustrating how I should (and have not) done testing and your examples made sense to me outside of a WP environment. Thank you!

I'm fairly new to unit testing and OOP. Your talk not only clearly articulated a clear approach to developing using TDD, but it also illustrated a basic OO model in the process. That was a welcome bonus for me. Your speaking skills can't be underestimated either - you delivered your points clearly and concisely. Thank you so much!

Great talk Chris, I really appreciated you laying out the barriers to implementing TDD so clearly.

I really liked this talk, not only for its content but because your delivery felt very polished and informed. You weren't at the edge of your knowledge and grasping at how to explain the concepts you were advocating.

My only suggestion is to either embrace or cut the SOLID principles in this talk. The rest of my current team, while familiar with some of the concepts around testing, hadn't heard of SOLID before. (I'm still building up their base knowledge rather than throw more rules at them.) So your slide with just "SOLID" on it and you reciting the acronym principles felt a bit overwhelming for them. Especially having it early in the talk and then the rest of the talk didn't really mention them. It felt like you flexing a bit of muscle to acronym-drop that you were "in the know" wink wink nudge nudge to anyone else already on the TDD train.

Yes, the principles are important, but I'm not convinced they're any benefit other than a passing mention, "If you've heard of the SOLID principles some of what we'll talk about will be familiar. If not, no problem, just pay attention to how our code examples evolve." You can certainly advocate for them more at the end by referring to a book that outlines them well for those interesting in learning to think about writing well factored code.

I loved the code examples, they were perfectly succinct yet complex enough to be grasped on slides. Your evolution of the code and showing the TDD cycle was perfectly paced and well explained. For a topic that can easily come across as dry and boring you nailed it.