OpenWest 2015
6 - 9 May 2015 at Utah Valley University

Interesting topic, and I liked how the presenter wasn't trying to sell us on systemd (in fact I think he doesn't really like it). It was high-level intro stuff, but that's what I was looking for.

Granted the title is "Getting started", but this was much more high-level "intro" material than I expected, and I did not get much out of it. I think OpenWest would benefit from some sort of system of ranking talks from "Beginner" to "Advanced". There were some good points about selling management and other business-side things like that.

It was a good topic, which I am currently dealing with at work. I learned about some promising new tools to help solve my issues replacing cron, including Resque and the Laravel queue component. There was a good analysis of the problems that Cron and "Poor-mans-cron" have.

In the spirit of constructive criticism, some things that could be added to the talk for the future (which would help fill 45 minutes) might be:
-More background on non-PHP queuing engine options like Beanstalk, IronMQ, etc
-Gearman (a popular PHP tool I had found through Google)
-Discussion about distributed systems (worker pools, etc)
-Code examples

James had a lot of enthusiasm for the topic, but I'm afraid I have to echo the concern that while a TON of great tools were listed, there was not much depth on what the tools are really for, how they work, how to use them, etc.

In the future, I would maybe try organizing the talk by starting with the basic Big Data concepts (ML, Map-Reduce, cluster-file systems), having a bit more description and explanation of each concept, and then quickly mention the most popular tools that use it. Trying to list out every tool (Hive, Pig, Mahout, YARN, etc, etc, etc) in 45 minutes is just too overwhelming (buzzword soup!).

Please take this as constructive criticism, I did enjoy the talk. Thanks for presenting! I intend to check out some the Utah Big Data events in the future.

I enjoyed the honest discussion of the drawbacks to SOA's that are excluded from most Microservices talks. SOA's do add a lot of complexity, which is hard to manage. I didn't gain a lot from the Prisoner's Dilemma analogy, but many good tips about handling service failures were given (caching!), which I plan to put right to use as we are currently breaking out parts of our app into services.

A useful intro to the Reactor and Beacons, two parts of Salt I was not familiar with. Some interesting use-cases were presented too, showcasing the flexibility of the eventing system.

The title and description didn't quite represent the content of the talk well enough, in my opinion. Some good ideas were presented about how to create compatibility layers between bad Enterprise APIs though. Perhaps a title like "Hating your company's enterprise software less using Microservices"? Also, it ran like 15 or 20 minutes short, and since everyone was a bit confused by the content there was't any good Q&A after, either.

GREAT summary of what HHVM and Hack are, where they came from, and more importantly: why they are cool. Covered the high-level points very well while still touching on some good details, and just the right amount of info for the 45 time-slot. I knew a little bit about HHVM and Hack before, but now I'm really excited to give them a try.

Dmitry was very knowledgeable about the topic, but he wasn't able to fit the content he wanted to present into the time slot very well. So much time was spent talking about specific web application vulnerabilities on the Top Ten lists (XSS, CSRF, etc) that he didn't have any time to talk about Zed Attack Proxy. It was a useful refresher on web security, but I was hoping for a little more info about OWASP's tools.

I felt bad almost no one showed up Saturday morning, but props to Phil for giving our small group a good presentation. Lots of good tips on publishing Open Source in general, as well as PHP-specific details and some helpful resources to learn more. Great slides too.