MidwestPHP Conference
2 - 3 Mar 2013 at University of Minnesota's Continuing Education and Conference Center

This was an interesting talk, once the microphone buzz stopped. It was too long on the old days, and seemed to just sort of stop before jumping to the present. I guess the point was something like the more things change, the more they stay the same -- with each new attempt to reduce complexity and potential for error adding more complexity. That is, until now, with the advent of PaaS. Somehow this struck me as a self-defeating narrative.

In any case, this would have been more appropriate as a session topic, not a keynote. It could have been made more keynote-like by talking about the general trends in web development, through a PHP lens, and how "old" tech has improved (e.g. current VPS offerings) and new tech is emerging (cloud, multilingual applications, etc) to address and interact with those trends. Just a suggestion.

I already started out with a good JavaScript background and so I eagerly waited for the middle of the presentation. However, When you got to the point of much confusion in JavaScript, the context and scope discussion, I feel that this topic could have warranted the entire 45 minutes.

The presetation felt a bit like the Crockford talks on YouTube, filtered down to just programming and then somewhat condensed down to 45 minutes. Due to the compression, I believe those confusing portions didn't become much more clear but they did at least give us search terms for the next time we need to Google for a solution to a problem. Maybe next year they will let you go for >= 1 hour next time?

Also, your examples seemed a bit small. It's difficult balancing complexity and size when you are constrained to what anyone can see on a single slide. If you manage to make the examples a little more complex so they mimic real-world scenarios, that would have been fantastic. Also, maybe (with that >= 1 hour) you could cover ES5's .bind() method.

I liked the layout of the slides and the natural progression of the talk. It explained the concepts quite clearly with the examples.

The talk's description didn't seem to match the actual presentation at first blush, but the content was really enjoyable. You showed off real world problems, stepped through how one can detect where issues hid and finally proposed solutions. I'll mirror that it did lean a bit heavily on database slowness, but that's to be expected since a lot of PHP problems start off in that location.

I like the research you presented and the multitude of techinques one can employ to enhance retention. The slides were useful and your slower talking allowed us to ponder points during the presentation. A great way to start the conference.

Josh is my new favorite. This was awesome.

The talk was a little bit advanced for me, but very interesting, engaging and well presented.

Great talk, have heard a lot of people discussing testing and how great the talk was after. Only advice would be to slow down just a little, it could definitely use a larger time slot.

Fabulous! Possibly the best presentation of the whole conference. I really admire your passion for the topic. Thanks so much!