MidwestPHP 2014
14 - 16 Mar 2014
at University of St Thomas
Talk comments
Great talk! I especially liked the entertaining intro describing WordPress conflict. I walked away with some good (and new) information and really appreciated the entertaining way you presented the information.
Fantastic talk Eryn! You had great insights throughout your talk - wonderful!
An interesting talk
I've had the privilege of seeing Josh present several times now, and every time I learn something new that I can take back and apply to my workflow. Sometimes - like today - he reinforces that I'm on the right path with my own RWD work, and hearing his perspective gives me more to chew on with how I'm approaching design problems in my own projects.
For example, floats/table-cell/text-align: justify. I use each of these almost every day in my own front-end work, and it seems I'm on the right path since I'm handling these situations exactly as Josh described. I've been hesitant to delve further into flexbox largely due to the limited browser support, but I'm realizing more and more that that's something I just need to get over. Write your code, build in your fallbacks, and you're good. Beyond that, I got some tips about some new tools (the Picturefill JavaScript library that he mentioned in passing - I'm looking that up tonight!), tricks (the 0% image quality trick in PhotoShop blows my mind), and food for thought as I continue in my career.
As always, I appreciated Josh's high energy, and thought he was a perfect speaker to close out the conference. I can't wait to see what he's got in store next time.
All weekend I've been telling anyone who would listen that the secret to a great talk is to have one overarching message with several key points, and I think Eryn's presentation fit the spirit of my preaching very well. I'll need to reference her slides again later to remember all of the miscellaneous details, but "Facilitate > Advocate > Motivate" is in my brain even a few hours later.
Like Jacob said above (and Eryn said in her talk), every company is different, so it's interesting to apply Eryn's talk to my own situation, where I am the only other developer at my company beside my boss. Essentially, I am the tech lead because I manage all of my own projects and communication with the clients, including issues related to project deadlines, scope changes, etc. So, I've definitely experienced many of the issues that Eryn touched upon firsthand, and how I am left to handle them is a bit different since I don't have a team who is working on the actual code (because hey, I'm doing that too!).
All that said, I really appreciated having some perspective from the non-technical site of managing projects and making sure the final product gets delivered, and Eryn's presentation was packed with information that I need to process and distill into my own workflow. Great job.
Excellent start to the day, brought back some good memories of the good ol' days and those awesome flip phones
Was looking forward to the concept highlighted in the talk ... the slides lacked enough detail to be useful after the talk, or to permit being presented without notes.
Great talk, covered the topic in depth without being at all confusing