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

This panel discussion was a sobering reminder that we in the development community have a long way to go when it comes to providing a safe and inclusive work environment for all. Beth courageously shared some heartbreaking examples of sexism, double-standards, and sexual harassment she has faced as a professional developer, and it sparked robust conversation about where we are as an industry today, and what can be done to improve things.

I strongly agree with those who thought this discussion should have been longer, and I'm very appreciative of Beth, Eryn, and Gary for sharing their thoughts and opinions on this topic. I hope we will continue to see more talks like this at other conferences in the future.

This is a really hard topic to cover, but I feel like the speaker did a really good job of giving a high level overview that gives people an insight into just what to expect when they want to dig in a little further.
Excellent job!

I feel that there was a disconnect between the content presented during this talk and what it promised to deliver in its description. Like several others have already mentioned, I thought the shift to discussing functional programming concepts when I was expecting more of an overview of what can be achieved with ES6 was difficult to adapt to. That said, Nate is very clearly adept at working with this language, though this presentation could benefit from being split up into several different talks (maybe one on new features, one on tools and libraries, and one on functional programming) that each provide a specific focus.

Good stuff and presented in a very heartfelt manner. Videos were good exposure to the reality of accessibility issues for some people. It's easy to find accessibility standard documents, but not every day that I stumble into a story that connects me to those realities.

This talk delivered on its promise: to expose attendees to the huge variety of files they might encounter when working with an open-source project. Jeremy handily mapped out a sample file structure so that newer devs will have a better understanding of which directories are there, what their purpose is, and the files that might be found within them. He also provided a general overview of the tools that get used to create these files and what they do, and provided tips for files to include in one's GitHub repository. Great job!

Excellent and impassioned pitch for contributing to the open source community. Good to know more about the state of PHP as a living and breathing software project. Clearly you have much experience in the trenches.

Only complaint: what's with the potshots taken at Richard Stallman? I think if you're going to call someone a terrible human being (paraphrase) in a talk, you should include material backing up that accusation. I'm not saying he's beyond criticism or worried about his feelings. Is there a horrible hurtful thing he did that everybody else knows about? I'm ignorant of it (I did google "richard stallman terrible person" FWIW). Just seemed weird and a bit offputting to start a talk about contributing to OS with an ad hominem condemnation of Stallman. If he did do something worthy of that it's probably for the better to tell me/audience about it.

As a developer who has mostly worked with WordPress at this point in my career, I felt that this was a very good introduction to Laravel 5. I have been casually following the framework for awhile, and Yitz's overview of the many features new to this version convinced me to download and install it to check it out. Since I don't have any previous experience with the framework, I didn't benefit as much as others from the comparisons to the earlier version, but there was still plenty of information in the talk that engaged me.

This was one of my favorite presentations at the conference. Beth provided a terrific roadmap to developers at all paths in their careers to continue their learning experience through mentorship, either as an apprentice or a mentor. With a robust list of resources at hand, such as where to sign up for a mentor or apprentice, podcasts to check out, and places to go to get involved in the community, this talk offered up a nearly definitive guide on how to get started. Although a bit shorter than some of the other talks at the conference (I agree with other attendees who said the talk would benefit from more anecdotes from personal experience), I thought it inspired a lot of robust discussion and conversation, which was wonderful to see. Thank you!

This was an excellent, high-energy, and well-paced presentation that - in my mind - was largely a trojan horse to talk about caching, and I mean that in only the best way possible. Zack discussed a variety of methods/plugins/code libraries that a WordPress developer can use to prepare their site for an unexpected spike in traffic, and offered some additional tips that some may not have previous considered, such as making sure there's a separation in the web layer between the front-end and admin portions of the site.

The ideas presented were generally right on. The flow of the presentation seemed more to be in a "telling" rather than a "showing" mode, though. I heard a lot of it like "now you want to do this thing, so here's what you do, then you're gonna want to do this thing, here's that..." I think showing some stronger examples of the problems (that SOA solves) would have helped with this.

All that said, I've been to a couple SOA/domain-driven talks in the last year, so it might be that I was looking for less of an introduction/overview and more of a deeper dive into challenges of/approaches to SOA.