PFCongres 2011
17 Sep 2011 at Accomodatie Domstad, Utrecht

Thanks to you all for your honest comments,
It was my first presentation for such a large audience and I find it very difficult to do.
I'm not sure if will do it again but maybe another time with more preparation and in another form.
And the room did not made it easier because it was split in half.
Tnx anyway for commenting, it helps a lot.

Good and informational talk on the advanced level indeed. Very good use on best practice against known pitfalls. Thorough use of examples and the explanation how namespaces are interpreted by PHP.

Someday we can't think back to the days namespaces weren't implemented in PHP...

I don't have to mention the readability of the slides, Mike knows this already.
The story itself was clear: what is DocBlox, what you can do with it, some pointers to future versions and also some key points for developers. The one thing I missed a little was the plugin architecture in more depth. However, Mike has promised he will elaborate more on this when the release is there.
Good job Mike!

I don't doubt that the speaker knows what to do with MongoDB, but presenting is something quite different than programming. It looked like he didn't practice his slides too often or didn't practice it with audience in a larger room than the default office room. In a room like the dutch room it's important to speak very clear where he had the tendency to mumble a little.
Regarding the slides: Think your story though. There should be a clear story behind your talk.
During work there are particular issues you encountered with MySQL, address them in your talk. Because of those issues you went to look for a storage which could handle your data and didn't have those issues. When choosing that new storage, you've made a trade-off: mention this comparison in your talk. After that you could've proceeded with MongoDB: basic API overview (we're programmers, we're used to this) and some examples.

In the end I actually expected to get to know what the strong points of MongoDB are, how it relates to other NoSQL storages, mostly in terms of ease of use, and how it compares to a traditional SQL storage like MySQL. I wanted to know where the switching point is: when to use a NoSQL and when to use an SQL storage.

If this was your first presentation: don't quit. Try to think as your audience when composing your story. As I said earlier: presenting is something different than programming!

I agree with Pim: Derick is a very comfortable speaker. His talk was interesting and made clear to me what you can and can not do with extensions. And apparently there are real people behind these extensions! I won't be joining them as this talk also gave me a global insight in how these extensions are written. However, I do have to express my thankfulness to the writers of the extensions. Without them, my developers life would be harder.

Your excellent speech and the discussion afterwards left me wondering about these questions:

Is there really a quick and dirty method of programming? Is there really a technical debt? Or is dirty rather always slow? Can your management understand these issues? Programmers who are pushed to the limit qua time certainly are not the most productive... A professional programmer is always clean, and quick ;)

Great talk with lots of interesting information about the status of PHP. Obviously an experienced speaker which was fun to listen to.

Speaker was trying to be too funny, with jokes that would be more appropriate at a bar. Talk was lacking in structure which was annoying.
It was also a bit repetitive at points, which was also annoying.

Overall, recruiters are annoying. But that isn't news...

But do please keep sponsoring :) it is very much appreciated.

Was hoping for some good examples on what can be done with MongoDB, but was left a bit disappointed.
Might be a good idea to dive a bit deeper in the subject before giving a presentation on the subject. I think a simple map/reduce example would be needed to make it a complete presentation, preferably in such a way that is clear what can be done with it.
Skip the demo and just put it as prefabricated examples on the slides. The subject allows you to do that.
Although a live demo is cool, you need a bit more knowledge on the subject and speaking experience to pull that one off and still give a good presentation.
More knowledge on the subject would also allow for answering questions more easily.

But most importantly: don't let me stop you from doing another talk!

Good clear presentation. It came close to "selling the product", but not too close.
Only bad thing was the examples that weren't readable on the slides.