Lone Star PHP 2015
16 - 18 Apr 2015
at Addison Conference Center
Talk comments
I think the tools bit should have been split off to another talk. Personally, I'd call that something like "how to build a your company's infrastructure in 147 easy steps!" :)
Other than that, I thought the talk was thoughtful, applicable, and very deliberate. I like the (totally legitimate) criticism of the "overnight success" mindset.
I've been working with Guzzle for a while and was pleasantly surprised by all the things I learned in this one. It's come a long way in the past year and Jeremy did a good job of covering some of the more powerful bits and pieces.
While the "simpler example" criticism might fit, I'm not sure there *is* a simpler example that is still useful/applicable.
It was fun, but I'm more than a little biased. :)
Gets better every time!
This was really a great talk.
The speaker clearly explained what level the audience needed to be at to get value from the talk, which I love.
The talk moved at a pretty fast pace, but was covered in good detail and had very clear examples.
This talk came at the perfect time for me, since we saw examples of exactly what I need to implement next week.
With that said ...
I feel like we could have jumped in a little more quickly and used more time for code examples and less for an introduction to HTTP. If we're going to assume an audience who isn't familiar with the request/response cycle, we should be starting with a simpler Guzzle example.
This is one of those talks that provides value to almost everyone, regardless of their level of expertise. Lots of actionable information, just enough theory to back it up.
It felt like this talk was a little heavy on Azure, which is a technology most PHP devs won't be using. That it was drawn from an actual, implemented project mostly offsets that - real code is always more interesting than sample code.
It felt like there was a lot of talk about the tradeoffs of using queues, but not as much on how one would implement them and what design changes are required to take advantage of them.
Delivery/Interaction: Good pacing, good solicitation of questions
Relevance: Good topic, a little more basic than I was hoping for, but that may be more of a problem with my expectation than the level of the talk.
Expertise: Chris clearly spends some time in this area and it comes through well in the talk.
Awesomes: It seemed like a really well prepared talk (which is extra impressive, since I know it was a fill-in for Wim). Having actual code to poke at was really nice.
Do-betters: I thought the time management could have been a little better. It felt like a lot of time at the beginning was spent getting people up and running - maybe have a minion to help people while you carry on?
I really like both the vision/mindset of the group and the checklist approach to doing things the right way. I have a couple packages that I need to think through to make sure they're up to these standards.