PHP North West 2010 (PHPNW10)
8 - 10 Oct 2010 at Manchester Conference Centre

Socials is what I go to conferences for :-)

Good talk

Good talk, not too sure whether it fit the conference.

This was a great talk to start of the conference, not least because it reminded us of how our learning and career development is totally in our hands so it's up to us to make the most of each opportunity. So make the most of the conference day while you're here!

I also really liked the inclusion of building some personal study time into your work schedule as an alternate way of receiving training/development support from your employer. I'm not sure how many employers allow this but I think it is an excellent idea that should be widely encouraged.

A great talk full of practical tips and anecdotes, leaving me with a number of things that I should look into further. Ian is a great speaker who clearly has a great wealth of knowledge, so I'm enormously grateful that he shares it with everyone as I for one benefit hugely!

A really interesting talk presented in a very engaging way.
It's great to hear things from other people's perspectives and this talk was well worthy of a bigger slot on the main conference day.

I really hope to see Thijs talk again soon!

I think I enjoyed this more than my team did, but as cynical Brits it's a difficult tightrope to walk when preaching the gospel of community love to us. I'll try and spread some around now I'm back in the office and convince more people to come to our local user group. Thanks for the encouragement!

Will definitely try and find the time to try Nginx after this to see what it can do.

I think perhaps there wasn't enough emphasis on precisely what Nginx excels at over Apache, how I can do about configuring PHP or what I need to use instead of mod_rewrite. This would have greatly helped my understand how much work I need to do to use it and how much benefit I'm likely to get, because the difference requests for PHP wasn't exactly night and day and would only likely be worth considering if you're dealing with a lot of requests. Convention is always going to be a strong reason to stick with Apache, so you've got to make a strong argument for nginx.

As others have said, the delivery was a little difficult to understand at times, but I have to give you props for giving a talk in a foreign language and the only way you're going to get better is with practice, so I commend the speaker for his efforts and hope to see him again.

Big props for stepping into the breach when the previous speaker was late and for not being put off by the drilling that started 5 minutes from the end.

Although the concepts weren't anything especially new to me, it did reinforce that we need to use something like this when the fabled day comes that we refactor our database. With that in mind I would have liked a look at how to move a database schema towards this model.

Let's get the bad out of the way first up. While I appreciate that 9:15 the day after a social is never going to be anyone's ideal slot to speak in because of the sparse turn out of delegates, and it's a more informal day, if I (and other delegates) can make the effort to be there on time for your talk, it's polite for you to do the same.

That being said, the talk did a good job of introducing the concepts of what Zend_Tool is, how to set it up and how to use it. Brave stuff to try a live demo out. I would have loved more information on writing my own providers because I can see big benefits in doing that, but appreciated the links to providers written Cal and MWOP.

I didn't have a problem with the conversational style, but I agree that the delivery could be a little slower. Hopefully that will come with more practice. Just work on the time keeping please.