Dutch PHP Conference 2016
23 - 25 Jun 2016 at RAI Amsterdam

This was a really good conference overall. Lots of interesting and inspiring talks, and a brilliant organisation.

Really well organised, fantastic & insightful talks and brilliant keynotes. Food was great, the socials were great, and Amsterdam is a lovely city. Thank you to all the DPC organisers for inviting me to speak, it was really great.

My original intention was to just tag along as a speaker’s +1: the organizers were already awesome enough to invite me for the hotel stay, speaker dinner, and attending the actual conference to see my partner’s talk. But my attendance got pushed up a notch when I participated in the speaker workshop on Thursday and suddenly found myself signing up for a talk of my own at the unconference! The speaker workshop was awesome: connecting it to DPC to bring in international speaker coaches and provide a running start at the uncon (with a chance to win a speaking slot for next year’s regular conference!) was nothing short of brilliant.

Both regular conference and impromptu uncon talks were interesting, catering including fresh stroopwafels and icecream were great little treats, and there was a nice low-barrier atmosphere that made it easy to mingle. It was also great to see the organizers’ response to a last-minute question about a quiet room. Booking an extra room wasn’t possible at that point, but the auditorium was unused outside of keynotes and promptly given a new purpose as the improvised quiet room for the rest of the conference.

It’s wonderful that the organization took in feedback like this to result in an awesome 10th edition of DPC: I look forward to seeing what they’ll bring to the table for next year!

So far DPC16 has been a fantastic event! The organizers do a great job of picking interesting, relevant sessions and planning out the structure of the conference days.

I would like to suggest a few small improvements for next year:

1. Provide a description of the talks along with the schedule. The badge schedules are nice, but if I want more information about a talk I have to look them up on my laptop or phone. It would be nice having all of that info easily accessible in a small printed book.
2. Avoid lots of RTs from the conference Twitter account. I usually turn on mobile notifications for conference accounts so I'm updated if there are any changes to the schedule or other useful pieces of information. But I also receive notifications for every single retweet which makes it hard to filter out only the updates I need to know about.
3. Post the target experience levels alongside the talk description. Several speakers have commented that some attendees were slightly disappointed that some talks were too simple or too advanced. I think being upfront about the experience level will help attendees make better choices about which talks are best suited for them.

I don't think these detract from the quality of the event in any way - I'm thoroughly enjoying every minute of the conference but just wanted to make some minor suggests to make the conference even better next year :)