MidwestPHP Conference
2 - 3 Mar 2013
at University of Minnesota's Continuing Education and Conference Center
Talk comments
I wish I had this topic when I was learning to program in college. One could spend a whole semester learning better development techniques and practice dependency injection with/without containers, how to design classes better, how to properly make tests and become a better programmer overall.
I wasn't the biggest fan of the class naming, since it was just a little abstract. Yeah, I can have a Grumpy\Presentation::say() method, but a more traditional example of User::fetch() might help us understand faster. Instead of figuring out "What the heck is a say()?", we would be familiar with a User object and would know that fetch() grabs from a database and now I'd look for the differences between what's in my head and what you have on the slide.
You talked a lot down into your phone, which didn't affect the projection of your voice, but did seem like you were less engaged with your audience.
Even with those things, I think this type of talk should be mandatory until a programmer does start thinking about testing while they are designing code. Usually a programmer programs with the goal of "does it work" and shifting the mindset of "can I prove that it works" is difficult. Adding an "automatically" to the concept is also hard and I'm thankful you're trying to push all of the developers in the correct direction!
Great talk and a strong speaker, but a bit short and lacking in real code examples. Some examples of good and bad approaches would help the audience catch up with and better understand the whirlwind of information.
Wow, that was a great talk. Really skilled speaker. I honestly expected to find very little that would be relevant to my small business web development work, but Sara successfully and humorously transmitted an enthusiasm and understanding (high level) for what HipHop is doing and I found a lot to be quite relevant even for my small team.
A very well planned and thorough approach to the topic of caching. I'm happy to have learned more about edge side includes and little tips like using Memcached::getMany().
I'm so used to having people dumb down the topic or perhaps some people who aren't too knowledgeable give presentations. I had prepared myself to be somewhat hungry for technical details when this talk was done.
I'm thrilled to be disappointed!
It's obvious that Sara knew her topics thoroughly from how she gracefully and completely answered the questions that came up. The presentation was a good overview of what HipHop provides, what you have to do to get it set up, what it does internally. It didn't install it in front of my face right there in a console, but I also don't think that it would have helped this type of presentation. Great job.
Boy, Jason's comment really hits the mark. Great primer, somewhat lacking on showing how to do the server side. I still liked the talk.
Microphone buzz: irritating, yeah, but everyone has technical problems.
First 15 minutes: historical information might be interesting but didn't provide additional enlightenment on the problem nor help explain the PaaS concept. Maybe this could have been a couple slides.
The avoidance of dotCloud was appreciated at times, but no other PaaS solutions were provided and so I feel the topic was mislabeled.
Seeing you do this from a console, live at the demo (with your OpenVPN tunneled through port 443) would have been fantastic. Or consider using a wireless hotspot. I would have perked up immensely if you took a non-cloud project and made it work on your platform while we watched.
Very engaging speaker, great topic. Some code examples would help make it more relatable to real-world PHP. It seemed a little short, so probably the talk would only benefit from spending some time with the code.
I walked into the room knowing about make and ant but no phing knowledge. The presenter did dive right into configuration files and showed real world examples of how he has configured things, which is amazingly helpful. The only down side I have is when he was asked why he picked phing for his project though I can't blame him. I've use the exact same reason in the past: It looked cool and similar to what I already know.
That said, there's not much more I could ask from a 45 minute session on the topic. Well done.
This was definitely another of those should've-been-a-double-session talks. Still, an awesome talk and very clearly presented. I'm finally getting it with building testable applications, thanks to Chris' efforts and today's talk really drove it home for me. +1 on Tyler's comments - the phone-for-remote thing was occasionally odd, especially since the regular remotes that others were using include a laser pointer, eliminating the need to use a hand to point out parts of the code on screen.