Lone Star PHP Conference
29 - 30 Jun 2012 at Addison Conference Center

Brought me right back to my college days. I loved this topic as a whole, and the presentation was fantastic. Joel has a wonderful ability to take complex topics and break them down into simple, easy to understand concepts.

He seemed perfectly comfortable talking about all of this and the presentation's flow as a whole moved at a perfect pace. Plus, his slides were meaningful and not full of memes / pictures.

It would have been great to see some of the concepts in action somehow. Perhaps some small machine learning project that uses various strategies that we could watch as it learned.

I think this was my favorite talk of the conference. Joel: You could make a living with public speaking. You're that good.

I really appreciated the examples of how *not* to do things. :)

Pretty good intro to GD and Imagick; would have been great to see Cairo involved at some point as well. The slides which used layered boxes to explain how the code was creating / manipulating buffers in memory were very good.

Given the scope of the topic and only having an hour to go over it, this was a good presentation. The problem is that it was too short - so much was given only brief attention. I would *LOVE* to have this topic presented as a 2-part session instead.

Once thing that was particularly helpful though: Being told that sometimes you don't need to do all this work. The ffi extension may be able to do it all for you. Being told how to avoid work is a great thing.

Good examples on the problems of resource contention and how to use concurrency restrictions to handle those issues. Bringing in real world examples of machine provisioning in a data center environment helped quite a bit, and also gave some insight into how that business works on a more technical level.

Good keynote to start off a conference, especially on the topic of community's importance. That's the whole point of a conference anyway, isn't it?

Flat out sound advice for all development.

Good list of infrastructure debts with great specific examples.

This talk was a solid introduction to MongoDB. The talk did a good job of demonstrating how to accept data and store it along with the limitations involved with using MongoDB.