Northeast PHP 2014
6 - 7 Sep 2014 at Microsoft NERD Center

This was a really solid talk, and went over all of the new PHP features that have come out in the past 3 versions clearly and concisely. Nice work Davey!

This was a great explanation of how you were able to scale your application by changing from a monolithic chunk of PHP to using services. You clearly explained the advantages of serices.

It was also a great introduction to how you used certain tools such as RabbitMQ for guaranteed message delivery, AngularJS for complex forms and HHMV to speed CPU execution.

I would have liked a little more detail on what Express is and the problem which it solves.

I especially liked the commentary on which new features were of limited use.

I liked the commentary explaining that even though certain features are available, WHY it would be a bad idea to use them in certain ways.

The slides with the colored arrows popping up, one after another really helped explain what was happening behind the scenes.

I liked the version numbers in the top right corner of each slide indicating which version introduced the new feature.

I liked the section on the new password functions, and how the migration to the next thing after bcrypt is expected to work.

In a way, this was the best talk in the conference for me. It's because this was the best takeaway for me. It's something I can use right away at work. I am presenting the information I learned to my company so we can start using Composer as soon as possible.

No joke, fantastic talk which maybe opened some people's eyes as to how a few small changes can really make their sites immensely better. Pointed out basics which could be applied to all sites and the flyer that was handed out can prove really helpful.

The lightning quick redesigns by the other designers were a really cool addition.

You really made their sites pop!

(Okay, that was a bit of a joke.)

Covered a couple of the new things people should be using but missed out on a few important pieces of information. Generally either more information could have been provided or links to relevant documentation could have been useful.

I know you're a laravel guy but perhaps making the talk agnostic would be good.

Exceptions seemed to be encouraged as a fancy go-to. The example given of throwing an exception on a password failure with an authentication system seems odd because that is normal behaviour in an authentication system.

`password_needs_rehash` is an integral part of the password hashing API and should be spoken of if you're bringing up other parts of it.

As most people who aren't using the password hashing API are likely using legacy methods for password hashing both how to migrate these and ways to secure them would be a good idea. Also an emphasis on storing the entire output of `password_hash` without touching it is usually needed.

Your example of non-persistent XSS is incorrect. The example is more like CSRF than XSS as you aren't injection any content into the DOM in the example. A better example would be injecting script tags via GET parameters.

Splitting autoloading and composer may have been a good idea. Composer isn't always a possibility for some users (no idea why) so speaking on autoloading first may be a good idea.

Lastly, While it could have just been nerves or because of the rush from the previous talk going over time - and had it been, this can be ignored - the talk seemed a little rushed and ill-prepared for.

I really wish that I had something bad to say about the talk, something more constructive than how great I thought it was. But I don't.

Aside from the fact that I am not a huge fan of memes the talk was absolutely fantastic. Not only did it have a deep explanation of the the concepts involved, real world examples, explanation of what tools were used as well as who created them, the talk also beat up on wordpress.

I can't fault Jonathan. He is charismatic and funny and I expect great things from this young man. That said, the talk was toooo basic. From the description, I expected much more depth, theory and even how those networking principals relate to PHP. Beef up the content and this talk can be amazing.

This was an incredible talk. Great information, excellent tips. I think the steps outlined are much easier for managers/higher-ups to digest versus "doode, our codebase sucks, we need to rewrite it". The pacing was just about right. Though, this kind of talk really needs 90 minutes. 45 minutes is too short for such an important topic. Thank you Adam.