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

I came to this talk hoping to be shown the "one right way", but instead I got a balanced review of various options, along with their strengths and weaknesses. The talk was informative and I realize my expectation was totally unrealistic :)

Excellent talk. The speaker's calm voice and excellent clarity of language was outstanding. I felt relaxed and receptive just listening to him. He did a great job of explaining the thought process that has to go into self employment. I really liked his time management philosophy as well. I wish there was more detail in his slides but mostly they were just there as paragraph titles for his spoken words. Without a video to go with the slides, I feel they would be of little value.

I would also suggest velcro dots for those slippery Yarmulkes. :-)

I was a little concerned as this started out. It seemed a little disorganized. I would have also liked to have seen a couple of short demos rather than just the graph diagrams. That way I would have seen what it looked like in the client software as well as the diagrams of what I would be seeing. I would have marked this talk lower based on just the presentation but for the question and answer period at the end. There seemed to be no question that she could not answer, and I picked more up from this time than the proceeding talk. I ended up walking out at the end pretty impressed.

The real world examples made it easy to relate her ideas to things that I encounter where I work. While I did get a few take-aways, I was hoping a bit for a few more concrete ideas for certain situations. But I know that no 2 projects are the same ... so that's not worth dropping my rating a star.

I love Eryn as a speaker. She's full of energy, and she has a way of injecting humor into things without taking it too far.

I liked the list of ways someone can contribute to open source without having to actually write the code. Some of those things I hadn't even realized were an option.

The speaker went through things rather fast. Granted, he did get a late start due to technical difficulties. Also, the slides had a lot of text on them ... some were a bit overwhelming.

I thought the talk would be more about tweaks and configuration settings but it seemed to be more about server setups. Maybe I'm just too new to Magento to understand the ins and outs of the software.

I found this talk to be overly philosophical/ethereal. Not enough concrete detail. At the same time, I felt it was based around too much exercising of her liberal arts degree as she used sentences like "We can obviate that with caching" or "that is a pedantically true statement". If your talk is based around attempting to increase your audience vocabulary, please provide dictionaries at the door. Otherwise, explain yourself in plain, clear language.

Excellent talk. I don't think we will go this route, or at least to this scale, but I know a lot more about it than I did before.

Not the best talk. I would have liked a little more background and context before just diving in. I really just came to this hoping to get some info on what was new and what might be a killer feature I couldn't live without.

Great talk! Lots of good info! I found out there is going to be a killer feature for me in the upcoming release so I am going to hold out a while with MySQL rather than migrate to MariaDB as I had planned earlier.