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

Eugene's presentation demeanor is flawless — polished, practiced, and in control. The talk was a bit too full of "here's a cool thing we did" and could have benefited from more concrete demonstrations of how we can do it too.

Very solid talk: information rich, clearly David knows his stuff; could be a bit more concrete about the code and its trade-offs.

Felt a bit like a book report at times, but highlights some great tools I knew of and a few others I didn't.

Very solid talk: information rich, great mix of concepts and code, and really clear Larry knows his stuff.

Felt pretty dry — like reading a white paper in front of a room of people. Some good information, but I found it hard to connect with the delivery.

This is the first time I've been to an after party at the very end of the conference! Pizza and drinks were great, and I appreciated being able to hang around for a bit to talk to people I won't see for awhile for a bit longer. Thanks, Softlayer!

Top notch fun. I agree that more audience involvement would make this even better, but there's nothing like some good ol' PHP trivia. The Jeopardy twist? A bonus.

I now resolve to include the $hat variable in every project moving forward.

This was a wonderful closing keynote and an incredible reality check for just how hard it is to build a successful business. I appreciated Luke's straight talk, as well as his insight into the history of FoxyCart and the challenges and subsequent rewards that have come from his and his co-founder's hard work and dedication. Lots of great quotes, too:

"Don't ever underestimate the power of serving people in a tangible way."

"There's no glamour at two in the morning."

"Getting 'funded' is not a destination. Build a business, not a startup."

Great talks leave me with food for thought, and ideas for how I can best plan out my path as a developer. This talk did those things, and for that, I am grateful.

I wanted to see this talk at Midwest PHP but knew that I'd have another opportunity at Lonestar, and Jeremy didn't disappoint. This was an excellent talk that provided me with ample information to get up and running with Guzzle (with a bonus review/roadmap of HTTP), a tool which has been on my radar for awhile, but I haven't yet had the need to use since WordPress has its own HTTP request tools built in. As I'm continuing to explore other PHP frameworks and expand my own knowledge and skill set, I know that Guzzle will be an important tool to use. I'm looking forward to checking it out.

This talk was a bit above my current skill level, as I don't have any working knowledge of React. That said, Jeremy clearly knows the material very well and I took a solid amount of notes so I'll know where to get started (and who to come to with questions) once the time is right. His presentation covered the need for performing asynchronous operations within PHP, React's stack (including the Event Emitter and Event Loop), and various functions available to Streams, Events, Promises, Sockets, Server, and Connection. The slides were dense with information, so I think those who weren't able to attend but have experience with React (and questions to go along with it) could glean a lot of information from them.