PHP North West 2011
7 - 9 Oct 2011 at Ramada Manchester Picadilly

Enjoyed it, and same again didn't find it too taxing for a morning after the night before, but I do like a dirty url now and again, lol!

I was engaged by this not to demanding presentation, very informative, and thankfully not too technical for a groggy Sunday Morning.

Although Estimation or 'How To Dig Your Own Grave' : Rowan Merewood was riddled with gremlins, i got some genuine good advice about how i have been digging my own grave for years. Sorted out some changes in the way we do things back at work because of this, so cheers!

By the time I attended DocBlox: Your Source Matters : Mike van Riel my brain was pressing against my skull and I could hear short circuits crackling. But Mike did pitch up well and kept me alert throughout, and I will be having a better look at DoxBlox later ;-)

The talk wasn't really what I expected - I was hoping for a technical insight into compiling PHP to the CLR that dealt with writing a compiler. What we got was a case study in Richard's company's use of Phalanger to do that job. No one at that company actually seems to understand the compilation step.

As a case study, it was interesting, if a bit crazy, but I wish Richard had gone back to the goals at the end and reviewed them. Those goals were: not hiring .Net devs, not learning .Net and not modifying the PHP code base. Did I miss something or did they fail on all three of these? Further, the company is now dependent on a 3rd party and deploying solutions which it has very little understanding of.

A few others and I questioned the reasons for the approach taken, and I think in light of it being a case study and being presented as if it were a success this is entirely valid. Elliot - please, the very first thing an engineer should be doing is educating the customer. That wasn't my question but I think a lot of people in the room were thinking it. I wonder what people were thinking about the code samples as well? I've worked with PHP and .Net professionally and I wouldn't want to go anywhere near it.

So I enjoyed the talk but wish it were more technical, or as a case study more self-critical. Cheers.

Amazing talk. If only I had my environment set up so I can play along (Im in windows so I had other steps that I had to take) Really dug down into what it takes to build PHP extensions. I hope next year it can be an all day so we can get down into more internals.

Thanks for all the feedback! I plan to build on this talk and work towards giving more practical takeaways.

I've heard about Varnish, and knew roughly what it did but hadnt really looked into it before, so this talk was perfect for me.

A quick overview of what it is/does and then tip on getting started and some of the limitations.

Am looking forward to testing it out on a few projects.

well presented and a good overview of how to get started with REST
really enjoyed the talk

I've been to a couple of Rowan's talks now, always leave feeling like I've learnt something which is great. presentation was fun and even though marred by several tech failures he still got all the relevant points across.

Got some great tips and have already started looking at implementing some of them at work