Talk comments

Erwin Smeman at 11:06 on 27 Jun 2019

One of the best, fun and useful talks.

Erwin Smeman at 11:02 on 27 Jun 2019

Good talk. Maybe some useful tips for small companies (with lots of projects / products) on how to implement code reviews within their process.

Erwin Smeman at 11:00 on 27 Jun 2019

Very interesting point of view on how to "cache" without using a caching mechanism.

Erwin Smeman at 10:55 on 27 Jun 2019

I did not expect the talk to be this much of a pitch for funding

Just saw the talk in YouTube, and couldn't avoid coming to rate it here!
It's the best talk i've watched in a LONG time! And i watch a lot of them from several conferences!
I'm only sorry I didn't think of it!!
Everything in this talk is just perfect!
The only thing I think i could add was in the "Chirurgical Team" section: although I also haven't seen it implemented exactly as Brooks mentions, i can relate it to servant leadership, where the managers role is to take the burocracy out of the way so that the developers can focus on doing their job.

Final words: i was amazed by your talk! Well done Sir! Well done!

(Watched this on youtube)

I felt this was more about being a scrum master instead of being a tech lead. At least in my experience, all the items discussed are things done by our scrum master with the exception of the mentoring.

Besides that, I think it is useful information in a scrum setting. So this has potential but then I would slightly change some slides to focus more on the scrum than on the Tech lead role :)

Sorry that I have provided the promised feedback quite late, but nonetheless I hope it is useful to you!

The initial pace was quite high, I can imagine that if you are at a novice level it could be highly challenging to follow along.
I thought it was great you provided a screen capture of the whole tutorial so you could take a look at a later stage. Please do this in the future as well! What also helped is that you committed along they way so if you lost track at a certain point, you could resume track very quickly.

I was also stunned at how you were able to incorporate suggestions from the audience in the project! Very well and nicely done :D

One small remark is that the contrast on the projection was quite poor. Along the way the IDE of your participants will start throwing warning because of not yet implemented methods and it's hard to tell if your IDE is doing the same due to the poor contrast of the projection. This was quite confusing to me in the beginning as I wasn't aware your IDE was displaying the same errors as mine. Maybe in the future you should use a solid yellow instead of a darker transparent one as PhpStorm's default. You can set this under Preferences > Editor > Color Scheme > General > Errors and warnings > Warning.
To avoid this confusion in a whole, maybe it's good to mention the absence of the methods as a whole the first time such a situation occurs. Some people - including me - tend to implement empty methods before running tests for the first time which was what led to my confusion in the first place.

To conclude, I can recommend your tutorial to all kinds of audience except the absolute beginner. I think you require a basic knowledge of PHPUnit to get started or you will most likely get completely lost during this tutorial. Other than that, I believe your tutorial caters to every level of audience.
For the novice your tutorial is ideal to get bombarded and enriched with knowledge and new ideas and insights.
For the intermediate this serves as an ideal tutorial to confirm they are on the right track.
For the advanced user there are a lot of subtle tricks which can greatly improve ones workflow. Please continue to subtly mention you always work with tests and code side-by-side and show the shortcuts you use because they can make a great difference to the advanced user.

All in all, I would highly recommend people to attend future editions of your tutorial!

Pim Elshoff at 10:59 on 12 Jun 2019

Very enjoyable, insightful and surprisingly useful! Arnout cheated of course by being a mathematician by origin, but the talk was well structured, left you asking for the next thing without pacing issues and was never overwhelming, at least not for me. Sad to not see more responses!

ps.
If you eat an apple right before the talk, you won't get a dry mouth.

Pim Elshoff at 10:55 on 12 Jun 2019

Finally I got the chance to see you live! You were so well presented, too! I enjoyed your talk and you as a speaker a lot and would see a talk of yours without a doubt again.

For five stars I want you to rely waaay less on slides. As Dutch author Remco Claassen put it: never share the stage with anything brighter than you! The slides stole the show too much, and left you hanging a couple of times. In my opinion, you should never put anything on the slides that you have not already talked about, except code. Everything else should only be a *summary*, *after* your story.

Content was useful, people need to think about these things and you're fighting the good fight. Keep it up and I hope to see you again on this side of the Atlantic!

Pim Elshoff at 10:45 on 12 Jun 2019

Great content and well-explained, even though I half jokingly questioned the "state vs behavior" diagram. It's a dangerous model ;)

For 5 stars I would like to see two things improved. First off, as others pointed out as well, some polishing and examples here and there could improve things. However, secondly, I feel the talk is trying to cover too much ground. To put it in terms of cohesion: does everything in the talk belong there? Now I don't know necessarily if this is true or not. I "feel" this, writing this days after (sorry). But I "feel", again, that there are things you can scrap and still send someone off with the same message: OO is more than just shoving things into classes, and you need to think about these things.

To leave rationality even more and dive a bit more into I feel, and to mow the grass in front of my own feet as I'm thinking of a talk about this subject as well, I don't remember you diving into the why. Why do FP and OO and other paradigms end up aligning? Because the natural fit of the tools and the human process of problem solving: problem decomposition and solution composition. OO is a solution to this problem and if you learn anything else than that as the basis to OO, then you will do it poorly until you learn either the proper *goal*, or enough tricks to simulate it. In my remembering, feeling, yada yada, your talk is a good set of heuristics without the goal. I don't know if I remembered correctly, I don't know if this even matters, but there it is. Do with it what you will :)

I enjoyed your talk loads. You are a wonderful, soothing stage presence and an OO sage in this community!