KCPHP User Group - March 2019
6 Mar 2019 at Stowers Institute

I really liked diving into the Collections API. This part alone could have taken up the whole time slot and been valuable to everyone.

The Eloquent explanations were very helpful. You did a great job showing the different relationship types and having examples of when they're useful. The code examples were most helpful and felt the most tangible. The visual diagrams were fantastic, driving home how the table layout mapped to code. It was impressive how well you handled audience questions and weren't afraid to admit you didn't know the answer.

If you're curious how to take the next step as a presenter, watch other technical speakers on YouTube. Not only pay attention to their subject matter (hey it's free learning!) but watch for talks that really resonate and hold your attention. How are they speaking? What do their slides look like (more or less pictures? more or less code?) and how do they move through them? How does their talk tell a story and engage a listener?

Great work, Matt!

This was a nice introduction to Laravel Collections (and it's equivalent for those without Laravel: https://packagist.org/packages/tightenco/collect) and the Eloquent ORM. I had not used Eloquent ORM before, so this was a good introduction. Matt is a friendly speaker and does a great job of answering questions in the middle of his talk.

One suggestion that I'd have for this talk is to use a pre-recorded coding session rather than doing live-coding. It's difficult to speak, present, type, and properly code all at once!