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

Good Talk. I had been looking into Hack myself and got even more information from this talk.

This talk was generally a good overview of some SOA architectural concepts, nothing that I was not already familiar with but all valid information. The presentation was fairly heavy on code examples, which I would normally be opposed to but given that this was my first PHP conference I was actually looking forward to some PHP specific implementations of concepts. I agree with other attendees that there could have been more information describing the problems that are being solved, less for my self than for other team members in attendance. Not a bad presentation but not the most compelling session for this conference. I would probably attend another talk by Mike.

I came to this talk from the perspective of a plugin developer rather than a site maintainer so not all of the content was completely applicable to me. However, there were a few bits of information about WordPress that I found very useful and I walked away with affirmation that the approach we have been taking in our plugin is a good one from a scalability perspective. Overall Zack was a good presenter and had a well composed slide deck. I would attend another talk by Zack.

I am glad this talk was given as a keynote rather than a regular session. This content is important for all developers to hear, not just the PHP community. I think it would have been better to have this keynote in the morning rather than as the last session to make sure more people were in attendance. Elizabeth was just as engaging in this talk as she was in her session on extensions, though I would suggest the be careful to avoid comments that may be seen as condescending or overly judgmental. Calling someone a "terrible human being" for example. Also, while I think it is a good message to this audience to "ignore the drama" it would be nice to hear that effort is being made to reduce the drama if you want people to contribute to PHP specifically. To me drama = instability. Overall the slides were great and I would definitely attend another talk by Elizabeth.

This was another if my favorite talks from the conference. Yitzchok was a fantastic speaker, very knowledgeable and well spoken. While I am not currently a freelancer nor do I plan to be one in the near future the content of this talk was invaluable. Most of the content is applicable in some way to freelancers and people who work remotely. Great slide deck. I would definitely attend another talk by Yitzchok.

I really enjoyed this talk. Samantha did a fantastic job of presenting this broad range of information in a compressed format. While it was not any new information for me personally it is the type of presentation I would like to have all of the developers on our team see first hand. REST and HTTP are not actually a complicated topics but sadly most developers are lack a fundamental understanding of both. The slide deck was comprehensive but not wordy. I would definitely attend another talk by Samantha.

My biggest take away from the this talk were the tools that were mentioned and some of the interesting ways in which they are being used. Unfortunately through no fault of the presenter Continuous Integration is a pretty complicated topic and I don't think it can adequately be covered in the time available. Since the talk didn't focus so much on getting people up and running (the technical fiddly bits) I think more effort could have been made to offer a wider range of tools. For example, the only build tools that where mentioned were Ant and Phing. If you are going to mention one non-PHP solution at a PHP conference you should make an effort to cover the major ones out there (Grunt, Gulp, etc.). Similarly this talk focused very heavily on Jenkins as a CI server solution but with no specific implementation examples it would have been nice to be presented with a few other alternatives. I am not suggesting that he cover all possible options that are available in full detail, but maybe adopt a format of "here is what we use, and these are the popular alternatives". That said, Patrick did a pretty good job delivering his material and I thought his slide deck was well prepared. I would probably attend a future talk with Patrick.

I appreciated both the passion and the perspective. I really appreciated the story on taking a year to build the trust. That can be a hard message to hear, but it INCREASES my respect for the PHP community. It's this talk which has inspired the most after-conference discussions, and indeed the most direct calls to take action.

Shaming us into doing something? I don't see it that way at all. Elizabeth has clearly earned the right to express these things. Not everyone is going to contribute to Open Source. Nevertheless this was the right time and right place for the message to be heard. Thank you.

It's almost too bad the title included "freelance" because I'm not currently such. This talk was sound business advice, and indeed sound advice for getting through a productive life. Thank you!

To be sure, the focus was on Freelance work. I'm not complaining about the title; the speaker delivered precisely as advertised. Well Done.

This was a great session which sparked useful conversation. Thank you!