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

Good talk.

I had a great time as a contestant and as an audience member. The Jeremys and special guests did a great job of making this event fun and light-hearted. As a contestant, it was a little difficult for me to see the huge screens on either side of the stage since I was viewing them at an oblique angle. I listen to the podcasts, so was disappointed that I couldn't remember any of their names! Stage fright + performance anxiety = "duhhh" ... at least that's the excuse I'm sticking with.

I liked the concept of this workshop. I appreciate that the point was made several times that what we are dong in kata is learning concepts and we must decide what we are trying to learn. I have tried to make this point as well when leading a smaller kata workshop.

The kata we worked on, Conway's Game of Life, seemed a bit daunting for a 30 minute kata exercise. However, the goal was not to complete the kata, but to learn along the way. I liked the lather/rinse/repeat-with-a-twist cycle; though in normal circumstances, I would probably do the next iteration of the kata on a different day rather than 30 minutes later.

A HUGE thanks to the various folks who volunteered their time to act as helpers in this workshop!

Overall, Yitzchok's delivery is calm and well-reasoned.

I will be applying some of these concepts in a future workshop with my local PHP user group.

Although I have used PHPUnit before and use it as part of my toolset at work, I have struggled with mocks in unit testing. Why should I mock? What the heck am I mocking? Matt answered these questions and even gave us various exercises in basic unit testing and mocking API calls. It was these mocking of API calls that drove the mocking point home for me.

Matt has a great speaking voice, an easy-going presence, and a calm, intentional, manner of responding to questions and problems that arise.

I really liked the branded notecard with the idea of writing down one thing that impacted you. It was really a clever way to provide a hook and followup. I don't remember but was your contact info on the card?

Since this was my second time catching this, the non-English bits didn't freak me out and I think they added a ton of context.. especially pushing and furthering the idea that most of these concepts and thought processes are not new, that we just need to think on how to apply them.

On the technical side, the microphone issues were distracting but pretty minor overall.

I've ran a few businesses and hobbies, it was very inspirational to hear the successes and even some failures of someone's journey. Great way to end the conference.

I think this presentation has a lot of potential: everyone knows (or should know) why logging and monitoring are vital for maintaining a secure application, but not everyone is a system administrator or even has one on their team. If you're working in a situation where you don't have a sysAdmin on staff, what happens when your system gets compromised? Essentially, developers should know at least the basics - what logging and monitoring IS, why it's important, and what tools are available that can help us implement at least a minimum level of security.

What this talk delivered was several very-pertinent anecdotes about some security situations Cory has faced to-date in his career, and the real-world (re: $$) implications that resulted from these security holes. Knowing what's going on with the system through logging and monitoring can help mitigate these situations when they occur, which, of course is why they are important. After a few stories were told, attendees were given a list of tools with short descriptions about what they did, then the floor was opened for questions.

As an attendee, I would like to see this talk restructured to first focus on describing logging and monitoring - what they are, why they are important, and what problems they help solve. The stories are useful as supporting evidence for why logging and monitoring are needed, and illustrating the consequences of not implementing them. Though I understand specific situations are covered under an NDA, some visual examples would be helpful, too - replicating a security hole in code so users can visualize what they should be looking for would bolster the security portion of the talk, as well. Lastly, talking about each tool used individually, indicating why it's useful, and maybe visually showing what it is/does, and describing some of the alternatives out there will raise developer awareness for the tools that are available.

I didn't think this was a bad talk by any stretch, but giving it focus and keeping your audience's needs in mind will go a long way toward improving it.

I always enjoy getting the opportunity to see Jeff speak. In this talk, as with others that I've seen him give (Dependency Injection/Inversion, using Git/Github on a team), Jeff clearly lays out the topics that will be discussed, describes the terminology he'll be using, then walks through each section step by step. I think it's an effective teaching style because it guides attendees through the topic and provides information in a manner that is easy to understand, even if the topic is complex.

I've been craving more talks about application design, so this presentation scratched an itch. I appreciate that SOA wasn't being sold as THE way to do something, but merely an alternative that might be appropriate for some larger systems. Jeff often has good visual aids, and I think the ones used in this talk were especially helpful.

Great talk, would see again.

I've been looking into automated deployments for a little while, and sat in on a similar talk about deploying WordPress applications with Capistrano a few years ago (long before I was ready for this knowledge), so I was pleased with how thoroughly Andrew covered the topic. I know there are some complexities with getting Capistrano up and running with WordPress, so I'll need to do a little additional research on my own, but I feel this talk gave me the inspiration I need to finally take the plunge.

The only thing this afterparty was missing was those who didn't go. Great food, drinks, and camaraderie!