OpenWest 2015
6 - 9 May 2015 at Utah Valley University

Very interesting. I learned a lot about EFF, and he was a very good speaker. Not sure I took away much, but it was a keynote. How much do you really need to take away?

Fantastic speaker. I can't say I agree with everything he said, but I couldn't totally disagree with it either. It didn't really matter to me, though, because he said it with such charisma that it was great. And I'm going to do my own thing anyway.

The presenter was well organized and the class overall was good. I was already acquainted with enough of the information in the class on a general level that I think the presenter needed to have more specifics to benefit a lot of us. If you're at the point where you're trying to secure your applications, you probably already have a working knowledge of many of the pitfalls you're trying to protect against. He made the assumption that we didn't know them--which could have benefitted some of the people in the class--but I thought it could have been better with more specifics. Overall I can't complain. This was a very good class, and he did a good job teaching it.

Perhaps this class could have been more of a panel discussion with three to four security professionals shooting various ideas back and forth and giving various ways they might have been solved.

I hate to give a poor review to any of the presenters, but about 10 minutes into the lecture, they pretty much told us that Angular was too much for beginners in a 50 minute class and asked us what we wanted to know. Being beginners, we didn't know what we didn't know, so none of us really knew what to ask. I probably should have bolted right then and found another class.

If they didn't think they could teach an introduction to Angular in one class, they shouldn't have volunteered to try it. As this was part of a series of other lectures, perhaps it wasn't horrible if someone had attended the other classes, but I can't think anyone got much out of this particular class. I know the two colleagues I spoke to had similar feelings to mine.

I thought he did a very good job. Perhaps not the most exciting of speakers, but he showed us some things that I hadn't really considered before, so I got a lot out of his lecture. He was perhaps a little too specific to how his application. The lecture could have benefited from more ideas besides what he had done specifically. I think a panel discussion with a few security professionals (including Gary) could have been excellent... and far less specific than what he presented. Overall, very good, though.

I'll have to give them some leeway on this one. Huge subject for 50 minutes. I thought they were well-organized. There was no way they were going to make us all Node.js experts in 50 minutes, but they did a good job of giving us an inkling of what it was about, when it would or wouldn't make sense to a business, and helping us to look in the right places if we wanted more information. Probably everything you could ask for in 50 minutes.

The presenter certainly did his homework in finding Star Trek clips, but I'm not sure I got much from the lecture that I could use. Perhaps I'm not enough a part of the open source community (not being a contributor, myself) where it provided valuable information, but I was kind of hoping that the leadership aspect of the lecture would bleed over into non-open source application as well. It didn't really.

The presenter was very knowledgeable and had a lot of good information, some of which I'd never thought of before. Very good class with great takeaways.

I'm not exactly sure who this class was aimed at. It was too basic for me, but since PDO is getting to be a pretty established way of accessing data in PHP (unless you jump into using a full ORM), it seemed like the only people this could help were people just starting PHP or coming back after a long hiatus. He presented the subject well enough, but there just wasn't a whole lot to present except for use cases where it saved him.

Great personality. The presentation moved along well. He almost convinced me to start developing games using the Love2D framework. If only I had more time.