Lone Star PHP 2015
16 - 18 Apr 2015 at Addison Conference Center

Love this talk. Gave tools, examples, and reasons why you should analyze your code. As a person who is in a single developer environment this will give me a solid working foundation for where to start focusing on refactoring my code.

Great talk. Broadened my thoughts on how OOP should be handled and gives me more concepts to work on.

On the one hand, there wasn't much presented that I didn't already know, which really only means that maybe the talk wasn't geared at me. On the other hand, there was a ton of information provided with concrete examples and at a rapid yet comfortable pace.

Engaging speaker, presented relevant information in a humourous manner. Lots of good material here, lots of little gotchas you may not otherwise consider. Especially if you're just delving into building your first APIs, this talk is very much worth attending.

Stellar. Absolutely fantastic. While the vast majority of the talks focused on more technical topics, this talk helped the myriad other means by which we can improve both our own skills and give back to the greater community. I simply cannot say enough good things about this talk.

I did not get what I had expected from the talk, it was basically how to convince your team that it is a good idea to refactor code - while there was some good points made in with regards to this, it would have been great to have some actual code examples or follow a few specific case studies, and also cover more techniques not just focusing primarily on convincing others its a good idea. The talk ran short and the speaker had a lot of 'fill in' words. While talking to a large group is very intimidating, the speaker did seem very nervous and stared at the ceiling a lot which was a bit distracting. Just keep practicing and it will get better!

Very useful and practical introduction to common security risks, and how to prevent them. For those that wren't able to get vagrant up and running, or those that weren't able to figure out how to breach the security in your app it would have been useful to show us an example on the app on your screen. The resources you linked to for further information were great as well! Thanks!

Awesome training session, filled in a lot of gaps with my PHP Unit knowledge.

The only improvements I could suggest would be:
1. For the LSP organizers to send out the required files prior to the session, I personally didn't receive the email with the repo to clone, only the email requiring PHPUnit to be installed. Sending out the email 2 or more times could help ensure people receive it and install those files, this took up about 45 minutes of the class - sure some people would have done it in class and needed assistance, however several people had no issues installing it other than the throttled internet rate.
2. After giving us time to complete the code section, running through the solution too. This would help reinforce how the code works, plus help people that weren't able to get the solution in the allocated time. Walking around helping people was awesome for that 1-on-1 help too.

Thanks so much!

Overall I enjoyed these sessions. Assuming a training day will be added next year, please take the following into account:

*Ambitious - The PHP Foundations class was too ambitious. Every single session involved people at the back pushing the speaker to hurry up. The amount of information they attempted to cover was just too much.
* The amount of time spent covering esoteric history and terminology was too high. We needed more time doing code.
* The code should have been coordinated into a project. Start with forms, advance to forms that store information in a database. Something like that. Instead it was a disjointed series of code exercises with little sense of accomplishment or direction. There was little connection to real-world projects. It was as if the presenters presumed they were speaking to a room full of programmers who were there to just pick up a new language.
* In spite of the fact that this track was supposedly for beginners in PHP, there seemed to be a high level of assumption as to the tech-savviness of the attendees. This contributed to the major slowdown in getting everyone up and running with regards to software.
* Instructions for software were emailed the *day before* the conference, when many were already enroute or at their hotels. This allowed almost no time for preparation.
* The download material put together was missing a lot of things.
* Speaker slideshow documents didn't match what the speaker was presenting live in class
* Code samples were hit and miss

All of This resulted in a lot of confusion. Here is how this played out for me:
* The speaker would walk through code examples
* It was usually unclear if the code being discussed was for educational/sample purposes, or if it was code we needed to be typing out.
* At the end of each section, we were then given an assignment
* The assignment involved a lot of code we had just learned for the first time.
* None of this code was on the screen any more. We were expected to have memorized all possible syntax as if we had a photographic memory.
* This resulted in students having to ask the speaker to rewind their presentations, sometimes for 20-30 pages.
* The one presentation that handled this the best was the one on databases. He had to back up less, but it was still too much info.

A good broad overview of the problems inherent in testing "the hard stuff"
Are the slides or examples going to be available? I couldn't find.