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

So much wisdom condensed into 50 minutes! Luke's talk provided a few funny moments (ex. if profit is negative in the equation 'profit = income - expense' then you have a hobby) as well as much food for though. This was a great end to the 2 or 3 days we have invested at Lone Star.

Thank you, Sparefoot, for sponsoring this after-party. I really appreciate the relaxed atmosphere you provided to meet interesting people and join in some great discussions. Omni's beers were definitely a bonus!

It is after-parties like this that make conferences like Lone Star worthwhile. The speakers are great, the lunches are a definite bonus, but the people I meet and the conversations I have at the after-party are what make me want to return.

Thank you, Softlayer, for making this possible!

First the negative: I was disappointed that this talk was not technical in nature. Xdebug, PHP, and I are terrible companions; though I hope to change this relationship in the next few months. I had hoped that this talk would provide some technical zen to help me get over my xdebug trepidation. Yet, this was a soft-skills talk.

For the positives, this was a great talk to remind one to not panic when things go wrong. One should remove oneself from the situation, emotionally, and try to figure out what is actually going on. I enjoyed the real-life example and tried to logic my way through the introduced problem as Ben talked about various strategies. My debugging Zen only succeeded when he showed a funny-looking database record near the end of the talk.

I hope that I am better equipped to approach the various problems I will experience on-the-job with as much zen acumen as Ben reminded us to provide in this talk.

Hands down, this is one of the better talks I have attended. Larry's exudes infectious enthusiasm for functional programming. The end of the talk felt rushed, perhaps because Larry was telling us that he wanted to let us get to lunch on time (the BBQ'd meats getting set up outside our door smelled divine).

I was happy to take his ideas and create my own pure function as part of a ticket I was working on at work. This function was not made purely to put into practice something I had learned at Lone Star. No, this function was created because it was the right thing to do. Thank you, Larry, for giving me the language to create this small piece of (dare I say?) genius.

The ONLY thing I can suggest to make this talk better is to spend less time on the history of functional programming (aka Intro or Chapter 1 of any Functional Programming book) and spend more time on functional programming in PHP.

I would attend this talk again.

I hadn't planned on attending this talk, but got caught up with some great conversations in the same room (hint to prospective LSP16 attendees, this is a good thing!) so stuck around to hear Phil's talk. "PHP TownHall," of which Phil is the more loquacious half, is one of my favorite podcasts, so I had high expectations for this talk. Phil disappoints on a grand scale, because he approaches his talks with gravitas and jocular sobriety.

This talk emphasized not only code quality, but also documentation quality and PR (ie, Public Relations) quality. How one reacts to PRs (aka "pull requests') was also discussed. Phil spent much of his time talking about the important things that pajama-adorned developers rarely explore but should. Well done!

For my internal corporate work that will never be seen by the public eye, these concepts are still important. My clients are not anonymous legions, but are instead folks that I know and respect. Their happiness matters to me! The documentation I provide, the feedback I respond to, and the announcements I make are as important as the code I provide.

Serendipity led me to Phil's talk. I am glad that I attended.

This was a talk that I hadn't originally planned to attend, but I had gotten caught up with an interesting conversation with someone in the same room. Yet, I am glad that I stayed for Omni's talk. I had previously attend a talk of Omni's on Phing via Nomad PHP, so my expectations were high. Omni does not disappoint. This talk was general enough for the beginner, yet hit some points that a more experienced PHP dev could take home.

I was happy to see some good points on PHPUnit, as well as on Code Sniffer and other code quality tools that don't make the cover of PHP Cosmo.

Regex has been big and scary until I sat through this talk. "Don't Fear the Regex" is an apt title and description for this talk. Sandy does a great job of slowly introducing the learner to some basics of Regex and building upon that to take us to a place where, although we are not experts, we are in a comfortable place to experiment with Regex.

I felt comfortable enough with Regex in PHP after this talk that I was able to use it on the job for a recent ticket without having to search Stack Overflow first. Thanks, Sandy!

Michelle really knew her stuff, but came across as a bit quiet and uncertain. On the whole covered new topics to me, so it was great to hear.