Building Simple Micro Services Using Slim 3.0

Ran a fair bit under time; practice giving the talk to an empty room and time yourself. Speak more slowly and loudly. Try to look more at the audience rather than back at the slides. It may help to include assumptions at the start of the talk, e.g. familiarity with MVC, as I suspect some attendees may feel a bit lost otherwise. Define terminology as you go (e.g. not everyone may be familiar with Composer, Docker, JWT, etc). Overall, the content was good, it just needs to be fleshed out a bit.

Thank you for putting this together. Overall, I really enjoyed the content. Code examples were great.

Improvements: a high-level overview of the example api (what it does) and then a brief intro into docker and why you used it for this example. Mention that the code is available to download in the beginning.

I learned a lot from the session. Very knowledgeable speaker and great materials. Please try to go little slow next time.

I got lost quickly in this presentation. Sorry to say I went in knowing nothing and came out the same way.

My hope in attending was to learn what a micro service was, and why I would be interested in Slim to build one. The first two points were those very questions. Yet I still don't know a meaningful definition. As a result, the Why part was lost on me. I knew most of the terms, but got lost after "Use Composer to get Slim going." I really don't know what that means.

May I suggest using higher contrast colors? Maroon (or even green) text on a black background is nearly unreadable on projection.

There was certainly a lot of potential but the intent was a bit lost in having overly busy slides. Nervousness of the speaker definitely showed and hurt the appeal a bit. I would love to see this talk again in a couple of months when it has been polished!

Great job for your first talk ever. Thanks for putting yourself out there and getting up in front of others to share what you know. It's hard.

Others have already provided some great recommendations for improvement. I'll echo a few of them: explain in more depth what micro services are and why they can be beneficial, consider having a demo micro service ready to show, spend more time explaining what Docker is and why it is useful for micro services.

Keep working on your talk, and keep practicing it at user groups and conferences. Thanks!

As others have noted -

Good basic flow and content, excellent code examples

practice makes perfect for the nervousness and speedy delivery

I would highly suggest you rip most of the text off the slides and instead use screenshots and images, and showing code on black backgrounds is 100% a bad idea since projectors mangle the heck out of your slides.

The biggest content suggestion I would make is identify your audience for the talk before you begin and pace it accordingly. A portion of the room was fine since they understood composer, PHP, docker, etc, but another portion was utterly lost

It often helps to have multiple "paths" you can take in a tech talk depending on your audience (some slow down explain slides for more beginner crowds you can breeze through if you have advanced people, and more complex bonus stuff at the end for a more advanced audience if you need additional time because they got the basics quickly)

No matter what you put on your abstracts there will always be a bit of adjustments needed for the actual audience.

This is a great topic. I really encourage you to make some improvements to this talk and deliver it again.

I would have liked for the focus to be on WHY not HOW. I found all of the code examples and demo unnecessary. These details exist in the Slim documentation and can be found by people who want to implement this pattern. Additionally, much of the talk involved Docker, but this tool is not necessary for micro services or Slim. A separate talk on Docker might be worthwhile if you are passionate about that tool.

It would be better to focus on the architecture of your applications and ecosystem, with examples of your micro services. What do they do? How do they interact? What are some pitfalls of this approach?

First of all thank you so much for getting up there and speaking. I know it's really a challenge to put yourself out there and I appreciate the effort you put into it.

Like others have stated I would have loved to see a lot more focus on explaining the microservices concept you were demonstrating. Perhaps you could talk about some of the downfalls of having your user system inside a monolithic application and how having it function as a separated microservice would work.

I also think having some diagrams and other supporting visuals would help with the docker component. As someone who is familiar with docker it wasn't difficult to follow, but I can see how it might be extremely confusing to someone who is wondering why you chose docker for your microservices deployment strategy.

Finally I would encourage you to break some of your content into multiple slides and really show the progression of your development process. The very heavy text-based slides seemed to distract you in your talk which was doubly distracting for the audience.

Keep it up, I hope you refine and present this topic again soon!

This is a great topic, but as others have said it has a few rough edges.

In addition to some of the other things that have already been said, I would also suggest maybe either refining the topic down or splitting the talk into two - possibly one talk that is about the nature and workings of micro services that is framework agnostic, and a second that shows how to implement them directly in Slim. This allows you to work with different audiences and will help narrow down the focus of the talk.

I'd also highly recommend recording demos ahead of time. Live code is always prone to failure no matter how good the speaker, and pre-recording and explaining the video helps keep the flow of the talk as well as removes the frustration and anxiety of live demos and their many points of failure.

Overall it's a good talk, and thank you for giving it!

Great content and solid foundations of the topic... for your first talk ever you have a lot of areas to improve, most notably timing, focus on the audience and try to set your rhythm according to them, test more your environment and be ready for a plan B or plan C if something goes wrong.