Midwest PHP 2016
4 - 5 Mar 2016 at Hilton Minneapolis

Jesse - Thanks for the feedback. I chose to focus on the PHP side, for two reasons. First, there's really not much to say about the Javascript side, since it really is very simple, and second, this was intended to be a PHP talk, so I focused on the PHP side of the equation. I'm sorry this didn't meet your expectation for the talk; I'll try to make this more clear in the future.

As a long time programmer, I was excited for this talk since getting my hands on the schedule for the conference. I have the same complaints that seem common among the audience, a low volume, weak reduce example (although sometimes it takes real genius to see purpose in the smallest ultiliies), lack of performance data and reason from an optimization standpoint.

HOWEVER! I was excited to see John challenge age-old control structures and unescessary complexity in favor for more "self explanatory" code, easier to maintain code, more sensible code and above all else a revolution of how we approach "typical" loop based operations.

I see his point and idea of extensive pipelining, however even this style may become difficult to focus on... His last chaining example for example...

I would've loved to see some cross-over from his material with what's coming in PHP7

Regardless of all criticisms, I award John for his insights and forward thinking. The expansion of this approach with objects, PHP7, optimizations and who knows what else will come will keep us on our toes and maybe even make us laugh at the guy who types "f" "o" "r" in a row...

Thanks John!

While discussing Docker with Robert McFrazier after his presentation, I admitted that I felt like I was living "under a rock" for too long. But I'll fully admit that as a competent UNIX/LINUX sysadmin / developer, I'm accustomed to utilizing self written scripts to roll out test and dev environments and code, jailed and/or chrooted as necessary and connecting to them with SFTP/SSH, utilizing plain-old-versioning to develop and deploy code to the production realm.

Meet Docker - Mind Blown.

Robert had an excellent presentation, covered all of the basics and scopes of the environment and answered all questions intelligently. The only criticisms I have are as follows:

Title and description of the presentation could have been more clear about the goals of the presentation with regard to those who are not familiar with said systems. Development vs production values could have been outlined, whereas I was left with a real feeling that this was only a development ready technology, whereas after a 1 on 1 discussion with Robert I learned how I could in fact extend my development containers into production and orchestrate them with magic using some existing systems.

Overall I feel like (for me at least) this was one of the most important talksnof the conference.

Thank you Robert.

I'll admit that part of me, coming from a strong C/C++ background LOVES PHP for its type agnostic variables... So when I heard Larry start presenting the new features of PHP7, I was both excited and frustrated for much of the talk. The frustration was eventually alleviated by his explanation of strict vs non-strict declarations, but I felt like that could've happened much sooner.

That being said, I think Larry did a GREAT job of outlining the GREATEST benefits of PHP7 in a reasonable order. Personally, I'm a performance guy, so hearing about the performance optimizations in the latest version sold me. Period.

His insight to the Drupal team breaking PHP7 and causing numerous bugfix campaigns was reassuring however could've been a little bit more detailed. Nonetheless he pounded his fist and exclaimed that it's production ready TODAY.

... So if my production servers crash on Monday after I go full PHP7, it's your fault Larry ;-)

I agree with Les Lim, and actually all of the reviews prior to mine....

This is a complex topic and I feel like there is much to be gained from the experts in the community who are implenting these systems, however, and contrary to the intentions of Mathew Beane, all I could hear in my head for most of the presentation was "logz.io". He plugged it early on, and I'm thankful, but the more he explained, the more he admitted the elaborateness of the ELK stack and all of the complexities to managing such a stack. When I felt myself treading water I continued to revert to his early statement of "logz.io".

I can understand the need for managing this on your own, however not much reason for doing so was presented. As such a complex topic, I would recommend either staying in high level theory and need based use-case scenarios or drilling into the specifics of a portion of the material.

Granted, I may be ill educated and exposed to this area of development, but I believe the purpose is to empower and inspire, right?

The crude comments first: The first 10-15 minutes were plagued with A/V issues; Although apologized for, I'm not so much upset with the issues as much as I am upset with losing time to discuss further aspects of the material that could have been covered. Also, much of the information covered was pertaining to symphony; I enjoyed it thoroughly. However Symphony could've been mentioned in the title. While the beneifts and improvements of Drupal 8 were discussed in detail, the limits were never discussed, so I feel that I need more research to understand what Drupal is bad at.

The good stuff:
Larry's approach to presenting the content was unique, engaging and entertaining. Most everything presented can be categorized as "solutions" to prior problems and issues that raised concern throughout the community... Not so much as opinionated issues, but more so representations of a team working to improve a system for the sake of better practices, simpler maintenance, easier programming and smarter design.

I liked how the new version of Drupal leveraged much of the internal resources from Symphony so as to bond communities together rather than creating a new mouse trap with a new learning curve. I also liked how Larry explained this inheritance throughout the presentation. Drupal is not appropriate for every project, but I feel like I'm comfortable with its benefits in version 8 and its benefits overall from this presentation.

Good overview of the system. Would've liked to know what excites David about WP and why he chooses to leverage WP as a valuable platfrom. Sure there's tons of community support and addons available, but why should I use it? I didn't feel like this question was addressed. Maybe it's just my OOP background creating bias against treating everything as a "post". However I feel like we need excitement and renovation to draw new crowds to specific platforms when then community has so many frameworks and platforms at hand to choose from.

Insightful talk. Though I don't feel like an expert on containers I think I now have a good sense for how I might use them in my work and I can at least make a call as to whether or not I want to pursue the topic further.

As a father of two daughters I definitely feel the need to increase awareness and make efforts to improve the disparity in gender and minorities in our field. I too hope that some day should either of my daughters choose to pursue a career in this field (and I will be encouraging them to) they will not have the same hardships that currently exist or previously existed for their grandmother (also an IT professional).

I do feel that Kayla spent a lot of time identifying the problems and, intentionally or otherwise, making much of the audience feel guilty rather than inspiring us to do things about the problems. I found myself hoping that more suggestions would have been offered for ways that we can solve some of the problems. I was also surprised that there was no mention of existing programs that seem to be working towards a more diverse industry such as code.org, which I have volunteered for in the past. Getting to these minorities at a young age and showing them that they can be just as successful as anyone else in the field seems to be really important as Kayla suggested.

Overall this was a good talk and I am glad to see there are more and more people discussing these issues.

The talk contained very good information, but I found the speakers tone often condescending. I would have preferred a lighter tone.