Laracon EU 2015
24 - 26 Aug 2015 at The Royal Tropical Institute

Hell of a kickoff talk

As always Matt a talk that's both inspirational and often funny. Great work!

And I still think you're a nice guy ;)

Excellent talk and demo! I've been trying to improve my code in the same type of way, finding ways to eliminate nested conditionals but to see it demonstrated so clearly was awesome. Really got me eager to get back to my code and improve it. Also the first code-heavy talk that I could follow easily from start to finish. My favorite talk of the day.

Frank is a great presenter, and always brings a fresh interesting perspective to things I hadn't considered yet. This talk was no exception.

Frank brings his wealth of experience to the fore every time he presents, and he is passionate about helping others to truly excel in their craft. In this talk Frank not only presented a useful intro to React.js, but also gave examples of "the alternatives" and explained tangibly how he arrived at his (current) preferred choice of tools. This is a classic trait of Frank's talks: useful relevant info plus the understanding and background behind how he arrived at his conclusions. This not only makes his talks educational, but it also empowers the listener to make better-informed choices themselves (and also "sell" those choices to decision-makers). Plus, Frank's casual demeanour makes him engaging and entertaining. After his talk he not only engaged in Q&A with the audience, giving confident useful answers, but he was also approachable and ready to happily answer questions anyone had about his talk.

While I have not personally used React.js yet, this talk has definitely inspired me to check it out on an upcoming project.

What can I say: Live Coding FTW. You rocked this one Adam!

Twitter was abuzz with accolades of praise during this talk.

Lots of valuable information conveyed through practical examples. It's obvious the presenter does this sort of thing all the time, and clearly knows his subject.

There's a rather particular skill required to boil-down several concepts into concise examples which can then be taught to a room of 450 intelligent peers. I've seen Adam demonstrate this same professional competence with other talks he has presented, both with and without live coding. He's a skilled presenter worth keeping an eye on at future conferences!

Several questions were asked during the Q&A at the end, all of which Adam answered easily, confidently, and accurately.

Truly a relevant session for this event and this audience.

Appreciated the insights from personal experience. Good reminders about things to keep in mind as a freelancer.

Considering various mitigating factors I think Dries did a great job.

Not everyone at this conference would fully know the ecosystem components, so this was a good subject to cover.
And even more people wouldn't know all the community contributors who were given screen-time, so that was a good subject too ... and clearly something the presenter was passionate about (and rightly so).

As far as the timing at the end, I give big props to the organizer for not shutting him down, but instead encouraging him that he should finish the talk because he hadn't been allowed to start on time. It's great to see the organizers supporting the speakers so well (it's been evident in all the talks at this Laracon event).


Tips for future presentations: control the pace a bit better (it was a bit slower than necessary), and interact more with the slides instead of reading their content so much: Let the slides support the words that you're saying, not the other way around. That'll help the audience to engage more, and then even the people who "already know" some of it won't judge it so harshly.

I really appreciate Matt putting these concepts into words, and doing a great job at packaging and delivering it in a way that is both relevant and easily assimilated by this specific audience. Well done.

I greatly appreciated the practical exercise of digging necessary business rule information out of the client ... and then subsequently turning that into code by writing scenarios and specs, and using the tool automation to drive the coding. While I've done some of this previously there were several things that "clicked" better by doing this in the workshop environment.

Konstantin is a very good teacher and presenter. He's patient and has solid answers to pretty much every kind of question ... and was able to help many of us get back in-step if something was going wrong because he could quickly see and share the necessary solution.

His methodical explanation of the concepts made the learning easy.

Konstantin had a well-prepared git repo available for us to all work with, with branches prepared at several strategic breakpoints.


One "grow point": The afternoon pace picked up a lot, and sometimes it was hard to follow along. Perhaps it would have been good to have used some of those git resets and branch changes a little earlier so we could have covered a little more content together.

Thanks Konstantin! I got a lot out of this workshop.

it was awsome, when one person can sit in front of 12-15 persons; code and answer questions in the same time their truly a superhero :)