Midwest PHP 2015
14 - 15 Mar 2015 at University of St Thomas

Good information on a framework I knew nothing about. If nothing else, I walked away with the idea to use Silex for an API backed by Drupal. The live coding format is a bit challenging for keeping the audience engaged, though. (At least my mind wandered at times on the second afternoon of the conference.) If you could intersperse some more traditionally-presented framework facts and some comparisons to other microframeworks, I think it would really improve the presentation and help keep the audience focused - even if you had to compress some of the time spend coding. Thanks for giving the talk!

A straightforward, pragmatic, well-constructed how-to for SOA. I've been intimidated by the concept in the past because it seemed heavy and complicated, but Mike demonstrated that it can be both simple and practical.

Fantastic advice for freelancers. (I almost said 'professional freelancers', which sounds redundant until you hear Yitzchok talk about it.)

Good overview of the steps involved in setting up local CI server. I appreciated the discussion of (Git) feature branching, and how it can play nicely with CI.

Fun survey of tools and libraries that can help improve project workflow and code quality, along with some recommendations of best practices. Jeremy looped the audience into a giant "let's compare notes" session during the QA, which was also valuable.

(Hilarious side-note: I misread the '(phew)' in the abstract to mean a PHP tool called 'phew'. Turns out there IS a PHP testing framework called Phew!)

Nate's workflow application is beautiful and impressive, and the pseudo-in-memory-database project will see a lot of use when it's been open-sourced. That said, the presentation itself didn't clearly distinguish the nifty libraries from the nifty paradigms from the transpiled pseudo-languages from ES6. It was more "Look how I built this sophisticated application" and less "Look at this new stuff in ES6".

Excellent content and presentation. Very impressed by how the panel handled some uncomfortable questions (answering honestly without hostility). It was a great case study for moving the discussion forward without alienating people.

Great points - I've been freelancing for nearly 10 years and everything you said was relatable, and spot on. Your slide on Diversification made me think of two different points about diversification - diversifying your customer base so you don't have all your eggs in one basket, and diversifying your skill set so you can serve more customers (which I'm sure could prompt a good discussion about generalization vs specialization on its own). Even though I must be doing something right to be entering year 10, your talk was good confirmation that I'm on the right track and I'm glad I'm not the only one that deals with "an object at rest tends to stay at rest". Thank you!

This is a *really* good topic for a talk. I thought the speaker did a really good job speaking about the history of licensing and why it's important. However, I was left feeling like it was missing more discussion around the different licenses out there, the subtle differences between them, and ultimately why you might choose different licenses; which is often the bigger trouble point for developers.

This was an extremely complex topic that could have very easily gotten too deep in the weeds, so I appreciated that Zack chose a more high-level route. He provided the right balance of technical information with relevant places attendees can go to find out more, along with a hearty dose of reality about the current state of web security. Prior to this talk, I had only a passing interest in TLS, and now I feel inspired to find out more and learn about tools I can use to implement stronger security for my client's sites.