KCPHP User Group - January 2015
7 Jan 2015 at Sprint Accelerator

Slides from the presentation are available at:

https://speakerdeck.com/kmob/build-promotion-with-jenkins

John has an easy-going, relaxed delivery and treats all questions and audience members with respect. During portions of this talk, members asked questions and John casually answered the questions by firing up an example on-the-fly.

This was a good introduction to DateTime as well as a good review.

I appreciated that John also talked about DateTimeImmutable to answer a problem that I have encountered, too.

This was a timely talk since I have been tasked with looking at getting our Bamboo CI server to more easily deploy our code and spin up new, yet temporary snapshots. Learning what Kevin is doing with Jenkins and how he's doing it has given me better insight into what I can and should do with our Bamboo server.

Before DateTime working with time in php was a pain. This presentation was a great introduction.

I really enjoyed this talk and would love to see more on Jenkins and Continuous Intergrasion/Deployment

5/5 stars. I somehow submitted this without providing a rating, and editing the post doesn't let me change my rating.

Eric structured this talk very well. He introduced Composer and how to use it to install PHPUnit. This alone would be insightful for anyone wanting to get deeper into modern PHP. Eric really shined during the ping-pong TDD portion of the talk. His pacing was likely slow enough for a beginner and fast enough for someone familiar with writing tests. Eric carried a very friendly and approachable demeanor throughout his talk and interacted well with the audience when asking for how the audience through to proceed. It felt personal and safe.

My only suggestions would be to polish the delivery of the Composer portion. A little bit of futzing around getting autoloading setup and digging into composer.json could lose someone not familiar with it. I also would like to have heard more about the *why* behind TDD and what it affords the developer. Thinking about the various comfort levels an audience member might have, what one thing would you like each level to walk away with? How to think about something? How to do something specific?

CI can often feel like the boring plumbing that keeps your team going, but Kevin's personal experience building up CI for his team really shown through. His anecdotes were personal and engaging, which can be easy to gloss over in an infrastructure talk. I love that he was able to show during the presentation how a new commit flowed through the build stages and made it to production. Kevin also fielded questions with ease and was able to answer every question asked.

A great balance of personal experience and technical knowledge.

Your endeavors this year have certainly put you at the top of a very short list of Kansas City DevOps experts driving automated PHP deployment for a remote dev team. For those who may not have been too familiar with Jenkins they may not have realized any and all of what you have layered on were options--and not all required to just get started with continuous integration.

That said, it is so great to see a glimpse into such a successful and complete CI strategy. It was also great to hear about how the act of just preparing to automate it forced your legacy software to be rearranged in ways to add source control and separating deployable code from all of your other assets.

It was great to see what you are doing with PHP and Jenkins and I'm glad you could come share it with us!

I learned several new things from this talk, and I have used DateTime for years. The libraries you highlighted were what did it for me, but I can see that for anyone who was still using date() or even strtotime() how this would be immediately relevant. Great job!

This was exactly what I had hoped it would be. I'd even love to see it be a semi-regular thing. I enjoyed that the example was nothing more than necessary, starting from a blank directory and using composer for the auto-loading, installing phpunit, etc. I really see this as the "part 2" with last month's talk..and it was worth the wait.