Laracon EU 2014
28 - 30 Aug 2014 at Bimhuis

I just loved all the hugs <3

Thanks for the fantastic talk!
Example with Mink driver was the most excellent as for me.

Really awesome talk. A lot of the problems I'm facing while trying to write tests that make sense, are addressed here.

But I was lost on the topic about Liskof Substitution violation. And I'm really interested about the answer where people are "arguing" on the test code.

@Frank Sleggers, you are implying that Kayla doesn't try hard enough, as most women ("if more girls do this")? Darling, you have no idea. I won't reply anymore, I think you made very clear that you didn't get the point of the talk. Even if what you say was true, do you really think its fair and that we don't need to do anything to change the current environment?

@Erika Heidi - why is it not that easy? Kayla mentioned in her talk that she doesn't want to be the best GIRL developer, she wants to be the best developer. Standing out from the other developers, irrelevant of gender. If she's average skilled, she might be discriminated and an average skilled male would get priority for the same job. Maybe that was the whole point of the talk and probably true. But who wants to be average in their field? She just has to try a tiny bit harder and work her way up the ladder. If more girls do this, a M/F balance will eventually happen and the employers in future generations will no longer discriminate, because they have no reason to. Plenty of women would haven proven their competence.

But I believe Kayla wants to be the best and she probably can! She also said something like 'front-end development, I can't do it - I want to do back-end dev and make things work'. Design is a totally different subject and many developers can't make pretty things in design programs... but front-end is more than just making pretty psds - html, css, javacript, jquery, angular... are also crucial parts of web development - they go hand in hand and knowing both well makes you stand out already. This talk showed weakness, it showed emotions stopping her from reaching her potential. In my opinion it didn't make a strong statement for women, it gave the impression that women are more vulnerable than men and easily influenced by what other people think (total strangers on twitter even). A successful person, male or female, doesn't give a damn about what anyone thinks. They know they're good, and find ways to prove it. Neil Degrasse Tyson, who was mentioned in a talk on community day, is a fine example of this.

As many others have noted, I think this actually began the discussion of diversity for many people during the conference.

Always great to see NDT in a slide too.

Considering English isn't your first language, you did extremely well to push through nerves and deal with that.

I think this talk combined with Kayla's should be a must for PHP conferences over the next couple of years.

Interesting talk but didn't actually go into too much detail about how they had used Laravel apart from a brief description which may of been due to time constraints.

As a few others have mentioned, I think everyone found it refreshing to see someone saying take TDD the way you want to use it. Good presentation style, engaged the audience with good slides and participation.

I've seen Neo4J discussed previously and I've spent a lot of time using ElasticSearch so I was quite looking forward to seeing this talk.

Sadly on the day, there were a few technical issues that Michelle did extremely well to handle in a calm and professional manner which actually made the talk a lot more engaging for the audience as we shared a few laughs.

Good slides, humour and laughs throughout and a great product discussed - so much so that I plan to re-engineer a piece of one of my larger projects to use it.

Best talk of the lot entire conference for me.

One of the better PHP packages out there and now a core part of Laravel shows how decent a package it is.

Massive improvement from last year from Frank, very confident and aggressively so on stage. Owned the room from start to finish.