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

I've had a lot worse food when catering for 250 and it kept me going, so I can't really fault that considering it was free :)

Appreciated the free drink, but I think the expense of the drink when it ran out was one of the main reasons we left early. Money might have been better spent just bringing the prices down a bit, if that's possible.

Ok, so we had 5 people on stage. I believe Marcus had a lapel mic on, so why on earth weren't the four remaining mics on the table positioned with one in front of each representative? Rob and Derick sharing a mic made it very difficult to hear either of them.

Not sure I actually learnt a huge amount from it, other than it's Apache Zeta Components, but entertaining none-the-less.

4/5 for mentioning migration using Doctrine :-p

Pity there is no silver bullet, but plenty of options presented with the pros and cons of each. We've got a good starting point to go on with, so we can explore to see what will work best for us. Delivered with style and humour.

Perhaps I misunderstood what the talk was going to be about, but I was expecting more of a focus on easing deployment issues rather than how to go about sniffing server capabilities, how to write your code to be feature agnostic and testing on different platforms. Even though we only deploy our software on our own system I hoped to learn how to make deployment easier.

The talk itself was professionally presented and plenty of useful information, but the information wasn't really anything I can apply in my work.

Not the easiest presentation to follow, although Errazudin tried his best to make himself understood... all credit to him for his hard work (not to mention travelling helfway round the world to make this presentation). The material was good, and the slides both helpful and entertaining: definitely enough to persuade me to take a look at nginx.

Despite my prejudice against Plusnet after they kept me offline for three weeks, Sebastian's talk was so good I didn't heckle.

Turns out that we've been through almost exactly the same process in how we've gone about setting up Continuous Integration to help us deal with a legacy code base. It was affirming to know that we're on the same path and Sebastian's perspective has helped me clarify how the tools can help us. Sonar in particular looks like the next thing I want to set up to give the wider business a view into our work.

Excellent light hearted presentation style as well. Great work :)

An excellent presentation. While it doesn't directly affect me because I manage my own servers rather than using hosting, it was interesting hearing about the issues facing hosting companies trying to straddle the line between providing for a user's needs, while ensuring that their servers can't be abused (either wittingly or unwittingly)... and seeing some of the methods they employ to prevent "rogue" code from causing problems. Entertaining too.

I was a little worried at the start that this talk was going to tell me how to debug by following rules written by someone else rather than something Ian had come up with himself, which would have come a little too close to plagiarism for my taste.

I was wrong to think that though, Ian introduced some great tools, anecdotes and practical information that he'd picked up through the application of the rules that will help me improve how I go about debugging in my work and left me interested in getting the book the rules came from. Great stuff :)

Contents were wonderful and very inspiring, jokes were also nice :-)

Expressed the part that hosting companies have to play in the community very well. The few bits of tech mentioned were interested and will definitely be something I take back to work with me :)