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

While I appreciated the attempt to identify certain triggers of developer atrophy and ways to motivate, I feel there were too many assumptions made about the kind of environments in which these ways would work. Not every work environment is soul-crushing, and not every developer is motivated in the same ways.

I would've liked to know more about how one can discover what motivates an individual developer, and explore ways to incorporate these motivations into his/her work while still achieving a project's or company's short- and long-term goals.

More of a marketing talk outlining the new features without any depth or clear examples. The talk was over in 15 minutes. I'm sure this talk could have been structured better to show how to really utilize some of these new features.

You can really tell that Ilia knows exactly what he is talking about when it comes to Memcached. He covered so much information in this talk without making it feel rushed and somehow he managed to present in a way to keep everyone engaged and interested even though he had to cover so much in so little time. Loved this talk!!!

A good talk, although it was very propaganda-like, heavy on "keep the developers happy and don't get in their way" - for example, statements like "Experts can manage their own time". If everything in the talk were true, we'd never need project managers.

Things like "giving the easier tasks to more junior people" - while that's good, experts also like doing easy tasks. It's actually better if you split the work a bit more evenly, otherwise you run the risk of having developers with huge egos to overcome.

There were very few examples, but lots of how-to's (e.g. some ways to keep developers happy is to let them pick the software they want to use and pay for the licenses). The how-to's were good, but I would have liked more examples. All in all, the information was good, but not phenomenal.

This was a pretty good overview of gearman with some good examples of real-world uses. The talk did suffer a bit by being a bit too interactive. The audience sort of took over the flow of the presentaion and he flow suffered. I think deferring some of the questions to the end would have been more effective.

Excellent talk. Ilia covered an amazing amount of material in a short time without feeling rushed. Not only was the material covered in a theoretical way but was accompanied by short but informative real world examples.

Hi All,
I am doing some research on good open source apps that you can use for prototyping. Keep in mind that Balsamiq is $79.

I enjoyed the talk and thought speaker did a good job of discussing what the benefits are of getting more active in the community and how to do that.