PHP Dorset February 2016
1 Feb 2016 at St Ambrose Church Hall

A good talk from Toby that gives an introduction to some of the things to consider when being self employed. With such a broad topic there is a lot to cover - so there wasn't much detail about which choice is best to make in which circumstances - but the talk defiantly gets you thinking about some of the options available so you can go and research further.

It would be nice to have gone into more detail in some areas if time allowed (e.g. sole trader vs limited company - which is a better structure to use under which circumstances) - or perhaps even a spin-off talk.

Toby spoke clearly and it was easy to follow along with the slides too.

Overall a great talk - thanks a lot!

Disclaimer: Matt's slides got jumbled moments before he gave the talk

Enjoyed this talk and really liked the concept behind it: Drawing similarities between the code of conduct scouts are taught from a young age with the type of behaviour we might expect from "good developers"

Difficult to give a "proper" rating for this because of slide jumble which understandably affected the delivery!

Matt's concept for this talk is great and focuses on the moral and obligation side of what we do.

From the title I thought it was a talk about recruiting good developers, perhaps a slight rename could help here.
The abstract differs from the talk in some ways - I don't think the talk was, or should be, about proving scouts and developers are similar. However it did have some nice insights from lessons in the scouting world and how we can adopt those practices in our roles as developers.

There was a good use of metaphor in some of the slides and there were lots of pictures of the scouts. I'd like to see that balanced with the examples from the other side - exemplary devs or projects, code examples etc.

This talk has some great potential and is the kind that will make a perfect keynote in the future with some more energy and pace behind it (which can be forgiven after the long travel on a monday evening!)

Toby clearly knows his stuff when it comes to handling being a freelancer and this short talk attempts to cover a wide variety of issues to do with going it alone.

There was some good insights particularly around the frequency of billing, which would have really helped me in the times that I was freelance.

I felt at times during the talk where Toby highlighted a couple of options there are available and mentioned the path he went down that he could have backed it up with more reasoning to help us understand why he felt that was the best choice. I think ultimately there's a vast topic to cover in a short talk so it could do with either being longer to allow room for more insight or the talk needs to be more focused.

Thanks for coming and talking to us Toby, I look forward to picking up more useful tips from following on twitter and hope to see you at a conference soon.

Thanks Toby for your talk on going self-employed you clearly know what you're talking about. I certainly learnt lots of things about business that I had never considered before. I found your explanation for calculating your daily rate was very interesting!

Some of your slides had hard to read text and large pictures. I would look to condense some of these slides into smaller bullet points and remove some of the pics. I would of like to seen some more of the things that you've personally encountered or find a challenge.

Thanks Toby for coming down :)

A very thorough and rounded walk through the different steps and possible pitfalls of working for yourself.

There isn't anything relating directly to PHP in this talk and I even think some of this talk could relate to any person (not necessarily just developers) going freelance, however the subject matter is so well researched you could use the slide-deck as a step-by-step for setting yourself up.

Enjoyed it a lot.