Longhorn PHP Conference 2018
19 - 21 Apr 2018
at Commons Learning Center
Talk comments
It's not often you hear speakers admit their mistakes as openly and honestly as Patrick did in his talk but every developer loves a good war story and this is a great one. A very relatable, real-life tale of shoulda, woulda coulda's that we all encounter in our careers.
Patrick has a very natural style of speaking, he was clear, easy to understand and offered plenty of insight. Great job. Looking forward to more.
The man indeed knows how to spin a yarn. I give Cal special props for publicly thanking the @twilio closed caption transcriber, Amanda.
Having this talk right after the Kubernetes introductory talk was very much a case of "if you liked dinner, you're gonna LOVE dessert!". I was in the frame of mind of being hyped up about Kubernetes already, and looking at the ways I could adapt my existing configuration to the K8S ecosystem, when a question came to mind...hey, is there some sort of UI for this thing?
Answer: Yes, there is (there are a few, really), and this demo of OpenShift was equal parts a powerful sell and downright wizardry, where I saw things I never thought I'd see a UI be able to do wtihout some tangled mess of configuration being needed.
What a privilege that this conference was able to bring the actual author of Codeception in from overseas. Michael clearly knows his stuff, exemplified not only in the software he writes but also in this abstract discussion of how to write robust, readable tests that will stand the "test" of time.
I can hardly overstate how important mental health awareness and accommodation is in tech. The work we do is far more mentally (and psychologically) taxing than most people realize, and our "code-monkeys lack empathy" stereotype has done us no favors in helping to understand and address this situation.
Nara Kasbergen, perhaps despite being a self-described mentally healthy person, has a very solid grasp of the complex world of mental illness, the myriad of ways that it impacts us as both workers and individuals, and some of the biggest ways our industry can adapt itself to allow us to succeed even when our own heads "get in the way" sometimes.
As someone who (somewhat openly) struggles every day with mental illness, I applaud the tireless work of people like Nara, Ed Finkler and the rest of the team at Open Sourcing Mental Illness (OSMI). I may not always have the resources or mental capacity to stand in front of a room of my peers, tell my story, and advocate for mental health awareness the way these folks do, but I am mighty glad they do. Someone needs to keep this discussion alive.
Accessibility should always be alongside security and sustainability at the top of everyone's priorities when building a web application, so I always love to see the subject get first-class billing at a conference. In this case, the presenter made excellent use of the allotted time, not only running quickly through a number of common frustrating scenarios for visually impaired screen reader users and pointing attendees in the right direction, but actually showing us first-hand what the screen reader "sees", bringing the real-world impact of poor accessibility very clearly to the forefront.
The information and anecdotes presented here were good, but I didn't feel like they told me much of anything I didn't really know already. Get paid upfront, don't work with people you don't trust, that kind of thing.
The problem is, at least as I see it, all this advice comes from a place of privilege in being able to be picky and walk away from your clients. If you're in a financially comfortable position, you probably have the liberty to do the things mentioned in this talk, but if you're struggling already, you may not. I would've much rather heard a talk that included that latter group of people, providing advice on how to protect yourself even if you can't always get exactly what you want. In other words, if you have limited latitude to fight for yourself, what you should be focusing on fighting on, rather than what you should be looking for in an otherwise ideal world.
Great talk, particularly as it reminded us of our place in the greater history of engineering in humanity. While we may feel insignificant in the big picture, we still have an obligation, as the Order of Engineers tells their members, to ensure we pursue the benefit of humanity and serve the public good with our knowledge and skills whenever we can.
Incredible amount of content in a short talk. I look forward to reviewing the slides and putting this into service!
Great speaker. If you've read through Object Calisthenics at any point, you'll have read a lot of the content of the talk before but the speaker has a very good way of presenting examples and references of each code smell and a realistic solution based on experience.