OpenWest Conference 2013
2 - 4 May 2013 at Utah Valley University

I think there was too much history of the project and too little _concrete_ talk of why I should go home and switch to MariaDB. There was a ton of information covered but a lot of it (history, code organization, etc.) was not really useful unless maybe you were joining the MariaDB project itself. Colin was a very good speaker though, obviously very knowledgeable.

"Do we really need another Pinterest? One is more than enough."

I liked his answer to the question about how to support the effort to make the world a better place when you have to work to pay the bills: work for a company that actually has some altruistic goals.

Thanks everyone for the feedback.

JLW: I probably should have spent a bit more time explaining that me and Joe colluded before the conference as he was doing an angular presto as well. He was going to be talking almost exclusively about the "Why?", so we decided to switch times allowing him to use his presentation to explain the benefits of angular, and go through the sales pitch. My presentation then became exclusively the "how?". I followed the book,and also the sites outline for the concepts most important to getting started with angular, but agree that I focused to much on the first two principles. I opened up the presentation, and seemed to be getting a lot of questions that kept me at scope. Anyway, I appreciate your attendance and feedback, this was my first conference presentation and I definitely feel like I learned a whole lot more about presenting than most learned about angular. Thanks for the focused feedback, I know it will help me improve when I end up giving another conference presentation.

This was a pleasant surprise, I was expecting a dry list of new features but he went beyond that to talk about different optimization tools and walked us through some ways to contribute to PHP. I also have a list of amusing quotes from this talk.

I hope that guy running 5.2 spent the weekend upgrading :)

Rasmus originally gave this talk six years ago so the tips were pretty old hat. Still relevant, but I was kind of hoping for something new or some greater detail. At one point Steve just said "you should implement access control" and that was basically it... no talk about HOW to do that.

I have to say I really took issue with Steve strongly suggesting that "other people's code" was rarely, if ever, to be trusted. It smacked of NIH syndrome and goes against the whole spirit of open source!

Sean was a good speaker, but I didn't get much out of this talk. I feel like we spent too much time talking about scope and some underpinnings of Angular, instead of seeing exactly why it's cool and why we should use it. The main example was a date field that would guess the date you were trying to input, but I feel like it would be the same amount of code (or less!) to do this using onchange and straight-up DHTML. Plus we barely saw any code. Still, I hope to see Sean present again, just maybe change up the focus next time.

This was a useful talk and Justin is a very good speaker. I always appreciate seeing some code during a talk, and Justin was able to modify things on the spot which is always impressive. He did cover Beanstalkd instead of Gearman but I trust it was a better choice.

Great talk. Clint is clearly very knowledgeable about this subject and has invested lots of time in it. The demos were fun and engaging, and it was great to see the code involved. I really appreciated the price breakdown.

I didn't necessarily agree that Node was the best choice simply because it's event-driven, but if you just want to use Node, more power to you.

This was a great presentation with a fresh perspective and practical examples. Well worth the time spent.

This class was a bit of a case study on what one person presented as SEO issues to their own CEO. It seemed to be targeted to an audience newer to the idea of SEO, but was full of good information and brought out some great discussion among participants.