Midwest PHP 2015
14 - 15 Mar 2015
at University of St Thomas
Talk comments
I like contributing to open source; this talk made me less likely to ever consider contributing to PHP. I don't think shaming people into contributing is an effective technique, nor do I think people are going to get very excited by somebody saying we need you to do the grunt work that's unpleasant. Also, the story told of somebody's contribution being turned away, not because it wasn't a good technical improvement, but because he wasn't trusted yet, painted a very political picture of the PHP community. Yes, it's good for people to get involved at a low level and work their way up, but if somebody has a good idea, it's a good idea that others can work together on improving. This talk had some good basics on the benefits of contributing to open source and some tips on being successful, but if I wasn't already contributing, I don't think this would have made me interested in doing so.
High-quality presentation about overcoming the developer stereotype to reach across the aisle and get involved with your fellow co-workers, be they project managers, designers, QA, or another role. It sparked a lot of interesting dialogue during the Q&A session, which I think is one measure of a great talk.
Everything I wanted out of this keynote presentation, I got, and then some. References to relevant reading materials, HUGE lists of ways every developer can contribute (9-5 or otherwise), reminders about the many rewards - fiscal and otherwise - of giving back (with reminders to stay away from drama) and plenty of links to get one started. Perfect way to end the conference.
This talk included some content that was very challenging and interesting for me. I like to see a couple talks at any given conference that stretch my awareness of concepts and techniques. This was one of them. Very cool app he showed off and examples of JS doing sophisticated things.
It's true that the talk could be better organized and presented. I feel like we saw the finished product a lot, but not the building blocks that led up to it. Needs more of a narrative, like "this was my problem, here's how I would have done it the old way, here are the steps I took to do the new way, now look at this cool result." Reorganization might mean presenting a little less material overall, but it's probably a good tradeoff.
Came away from this talk with a better understanding of what Silex is and why it might be good to use it in a project. That's exactly what I was looking for, so kudos!
Great enthusiastic talk! Some of my favorite presentations are one that leave you with one big aha moment. Understanding that git is a graph that only moves in one direction is a really big aha and makes a lot of things make more sense. Thank you very much for the clear explanation!
Good talk on the philosophy of RESTful services. Wish the slides lingered a bit more on each of the key tenets of RESTful services. There were some dots on a client-server diagram, but I couldn't see what each stood for, and the talk rushed through the definitions of those tenets. Other than that, very nice talk.
Great explanation of some key HTTP concepts and a nice demo of how straightforward it is to work with HTTP using Guzzle. Great talk!
Really loved how empowering this talk was for everyone in the room. Great presentation style, engaging, good sense of humor and nice stories that helped make the topic very tangible. One of my fav sessions of the conference!
Overall, a very solid presentation that demonstrated how an experienced developer can get up and running quickly with Silex. As a more intermediate-level developer, I would have appreciated a bit more of an overview regarding what features Silex provides out of the box and a high-level explanation of some of its commonly-integrated packages (I recall that Pimple and Hal were discussed, but at various points during the presentation, and not in a way that set the audience up to know what they were getting into).
One new piece of information I picked up on (and tweeted about) that I didn't know before the talk: PhpStorm has a built in REST client! I still would not have known that had Larry not done the live demonstration, and that knowledge alone be very useful in the future.