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

I rated this four stars (not quite five) because I agree with billperegoy. I expected to have more about how to build a restful interface, but the talk really didn't go there. The talk was still a good talk, but I would have liked to have the steps to creating an API with PHP.

Maybe Andrew would consider doing a Meetup night to talk about the steps he'd take to create an API for the source code of the conference web application that he developed for thise Northeast PHP conference.

Even with the MD5 thing, I think this was a great talk for these two reasons: (1) the speaker had humorous anecdotes that tied into the topic and kept it from being too dry and (2) useful information was communicated. There are too many speakers around who can only do one of those: be humorous and impart no useful information, or have a boring delivery in giving good content. I think that Michael would have shined as the first day opening keynote talk with this subject. And it actually mentioned PHP!

This talk was extremely timely for me, because my team has just started using Git. I especially appreciate that the speaker kept the level at the "101" level, just as promised by the talk's description. He also added a little humor as he went along, which was welcome in what was the last talk of the first day.

I enjoyed this talk because it totally cast an experience I had a few years ago when debating with a developer over how best to customize Lucene in a new light. In the course of only 45 minutes, the speaker actually showed how to use Solr to do what he listed in the talk's blurb (gasp, what an amazing 10% of Sturgeon's law: that a speaker deliver on what the talk's blurb says). He gave me tips on avenues that I can pursue to make my site's search results better match my users' expectations, and that made this talk totally worthwhile for me.

This was a solid talk -- both the speaker's skills and how he communicated the topic were solid, and the information was thought-provoking (which I always enjoy getting out of a talk). And it was a pleasure to have the actual talk deliver on the promises of the blurb: "You will learn actionable, tactical steps". It's true, we did!

This was a fantastic talk! While I wasn't originally going to attend this talk, as it spanned two slots, it was well worth it. The speaker was engaging, the exercises a lot of fun, and it was a breath of fresh air to interact with people after sitting through the NASA guy's keynote. I wish that I could rate it 10 stars!

In general, I dislike it when the talk's blurb differs so vastly from the actual talk given by the speaker, as it was the case with Toothman. Did he write the blurb for this keynote talk or did someone else? The blurb says "This talk will provide an overview of strategic approaches, tactics, and technical solutions being used to create a web platform that web developers can leverage".

Can anyone describe the "web platform" that NASA was using? If so, can those people describe which technical solutions were used to create it? And did you glean that from Toothman's talk? And where was the answer to the question "how does NASA use PHP?" While it's fun to oooh and ah over pictures of Earth from space and the Mars landing, walking out of the first day's starting talk -- which at most conferences, leaves you looking forward to the rest of the talks -- instead left me with a feeling of trepidation about how the rest of the speakers would be. Luckily, most of the talks over the course of the weekend far exceeded my expectations.

Holy crap! this guy is good! These are concepts that ANYONE can use no matter what industry they're in! Excellent stuff!!!

It was a very interesting talk that I sadly got a little lost in. However I enjoyed the MVC concepts presented because they're becoming more and more important to know for jobs.