Northeast PHP 2012
11 - 12 Aug 2012 at Northeast PHP Boston

I found the talk to be interesting but did not feel that it applied to the state of current affiars in the IT sector

Very entertaining and informative. It's hard to get both right and he nailed it.

I only attended part of this talk, so take my comments with that in mind. I like Ilia's presentation style, but I felt he should have used a better font for the source code. The font used did not clearly show the difference between upper case and lower case letters (it used smallcaps), which is very important when displaying source code for case sensitive languages.

Agree with the other commenters that this talk, while good, was targetted at an audience that already agrees with the speaker. The real challenge will be in delivering it to people who don't agree.

Good content and good insights, but could have done with a few more examples.

This was a pretty good talk. Great balance between reaching out to beginners and having just enough to keep it interesting for intermediates (see some of the other comments). If you're an advanced MySQL user, it might have seemed like she was simply reading out the MySQL manual, but the truth is she structured and ordered the content far better than the MySQL docs do, and threw in a lot of insights that just aren't available in the docs.

I agree that she spoke too fast, and if you weren't familiar with the topic, this could be intimidating. Also, the speaker podium was on the far end of the room and this caused two problems. First, people nearer the other end really couldn't see Sheeri very well. Secondly, this meant that some conversations ensued between the speaker and people sitting in the far section of the room that other attendees could not follow.

On the whole, it was good, but I'd have also liked to see something about EXPLAIN PARTITIONS

If the talk was scheduled for an hour, the speaker should have enough material for the allotted time. I paid to come to the conference to learn beyond what I can learn from google search. Just my 2¢.

I tend to like very technical talks, and that's why I tend to attend very technical conferences. On that note, while I think this was a good talk for the most part, it fell short in some aspects. At the start, there was too much time spent on an introduction and not enough of it was technical. Going deeper, there was a lot of talk about security and standards, but no details.

In fairness though, I've found that many times a good talk and a good speaker can be hurt by turning them into a keynote. It puts a lot of pressure on the speaker, they get nervous, and start thinking up ways to modify their talk to be worthy of the keynote slot. It's quite likely that this is what happened here. At the technical conference, the trick is to change nothing. The talk you planned on giving initially is what the organisers felt would be worthy of the keynote slot.

I enjoyed this but it felt a little light on the details - what I took away was more motivational than actionable - still I thought this was a really good talk.

I liked this talk - very good high level stuff - was great to see how others approach the world of documentation - I learned a great deal.