Madison PHP Conference 2014
13 Sep 2014 at Alliant Energy Center

Really enjoyed this, and it was an excellent way to close the day. As neither an engineer nor a computer scientist (I'm a writer), I intend to work hard to "Pull back and think more abstractly." Thanks!

There was a lot to take in here, and it went awfully fast.

Really enjoyed this talk (though as a one-time history major, I may be biased). Passion was really evident. Advice seemed sensible.

Sandy did a great job of filling in for Eli White, though I suspect Eli's talk might have been a little different. Some of this material went over my head as a new dev. Much to study.

Learned much from Beau on this topic. Great explanations, with good history as well. Have to check out Composer too.

Great presentation. Coming into this presentation I understood DI but the concept of a DI container always escaped my understanding. This presentation made the concept of a container much clearer to me. Thanks!!

Excellent presentation, well organized, nice bits of humor. The slides were very thorough and helpful. The system of starting with moving from installation to easy use of Varnish when all is well to problems and how to handle them was very effective. The explanation of HTTP made it even easier to understand Varnish. Very clear and engaging. Thanks!

The information seemed excellent, but it was really hard to follow. The text was too small and low contrast. Somebody asked a few times for the text to be made larger, and it was helpful when you did make it bigger, but it wasn't done consistently. Even when the text was big enough to read, the relevant portions weren't isolated on the screen, and so it was difficult to read the code fast enough to digest and process. It would be really helpful to have slides that captured the relevant passages of code, and also slides that distilled the concepts presented. The code in action feature is good, but there needed to be more effort made to make the learning more accessible.

Excellent talk, well organized, great slides. Ben, the book I mentioned to you is "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values" by Robert M. Pirsig. First published in 1974, this metaphysical novel has many aspects I think you'll find relevant -- it's one of my all-time favorite books!

I agree with the other commentors about the section on debugging tools -- somehow it felt out of place. There are passages in ZAMM that address that feeling, though, so read the book! :)

Some of the folks at the conference are a harder sell than me on the fundamental message of your talk, it seems. I think that the way to reach them might be by bolstering your presentation with scientific facts about the benefits of meditation, and about the whole body/mind/brain/cognition complex. I think that could provide the hard edge that the tools section might have meant for.

This talk delivered all it promised. I like the idea of "good code smells" that he introduced -- that might be good as part of an alternate title for the talk, in fact. The presentation was well organized, with good slide pacing and good examples. A couple of the concepts that didn't have examples could have used some, like decomposing classes with too many member variables. Also I was hoping to hear a bit more about why no static classes or utility classes. There was a quick explanation about why not static, but I didn't catch why not utility.

We have been focusing on establishing cleaner coding standards at my workplace, and I got some good takeaways to share with my team. Jeremy made an excellent case that adhering to these standards of beauty is practical, because the code is easier to test and run metrics on. He went over a good selection of tools, some of which we already use and some of which I want to look into now.

I think there would have been demand for Q & A if the talk wasn't already running late into the 30-minute break between talks (because the first talks of the day got a late start) I had to run, or I definitely would have enjoyed some discussion!