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

Thought the basics of Laravel were covered but felt like Ben didn't talk enough about what makes Laravel really different or what sort of problems Laravel solves better than other frameworks.

Of course, nice to see a shout-out to concerns about both the framework being tested AND making it easy to write tests despite the use of so many static method calls.

Easily the best talk I saw during day 1, which is saying something because Adam Culp's session on Refactoring was similarly compelling. I went into it thinking the subject matter might have been a little advanced for my current skill set, but once Aaron got through his quick overview of OOP, I knew I was in the right place. His presentation was high-energy, engaging, interesting, and relevant, which is everything I could want from a speech. Excellent job.

Did a good job of explaining the concepts of scope, context and the JS object model...but presented way too much info.

Went in wondering how much I really knew about application architectures that lead to nicely decoupled code, found out that I did understand all the necessary concepts.

Would've liked to see more code examples, but Aaron is a great speaker and I'm glad I went.

Adam covered a crucial topic (or topics, if you will, as there was a vast assortment of subtopics relevant to the talk), and did it with the kind of energy and verve one needs to capture and hold an audience's attention at the end of the day. This was a great session that I'd be interested in seeing again if I ever have the chance, perhaps with a bit more time to allow Adam to cover all of the content in detail.

Great examples of creating useful hooks, but apply the brakes on the presentation speed next time!