Midwest PHP 2018 comments

What did you like about this event, and what do you think could be better for the next time? Leave your feedback to help the organizers know what you liked, and what could be improved on.

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Crysta McKenney at 15:54 on 16 Mar 2018 (via Web2 LIVE)

I had a great time, same as last year. It was a wonderful variety of session topics and while I loved seeing a lot of the same speakers I saw last year it was also nice to see some new people too. The organization for the whole thing was fantastic. And speaking of well prepared, I really appreciated how prepared you all were for different diets. I was fully expecting I'd just need to "get by" with whatever I could find or go out into the mall to buy something different and was blown away and touched by having a plate all ready for me. And the vegetarian meal was fantastic!

I do have a few things in the "less than great" column though:
I was a little disappointed in how few speakers were women developers, especially with the local organizations we have in town for women devs (Women Who Code and Hack the Gap as two great examples) to pull from. Last year there seemed to be a much more even balance and even some sessions on this subject and I was sad to see what seems a slide backward to see that not continued this year.

Also, I'd love to see a couple double length sessions. It seems a common theme of feedback I see is "not enough time" or "wish there could have been more detail about this". I think as long as all sessions are limited to the 50 minute (and often more like 40 minutes as most leave about 10 minutes for questions) windows it will be hard to really dig into any one topic. With some longer sessions available there could be more in depth, advanced, concepts talked about. I think it would be too much do all sessions longer, the majority of them the 40-50 minutes feels perfect to me, but having one or two double length sessions at the conference on a more advance level topic would make me very happy.

Finally as a very tiny gripe, they took the coffee away much too soon. Came out of the first session on Friday and coffee was already whisked away! As a developer who lives on coffee I was sad. But it remained on Saturday a bit longer, so that was nice.