PHP North West 2011
7 - 9 Oct 2011
at Ramada Manchester Picadilly
Talk comments
Great opening for the day. Very enjoyable presentation with just the right amount of food for thought.
The talk was delivered well, Clinton is a good speaker who communicated with authority and confidence, and he dealt with the numerous questions well, without letting the presentation slip.
There were plenty of controversial moments, and as others have said, while I agree that due to the diverse backgrounds of the students it's difficult to use some of the more advanced techniques of modern PHP development, ultimately I think the students are being short-changed by being taught to use techniques like the Singleton and Registry patterns at the expense of better ones like Dependency Injection. These alternate patterns aren't a 'house style' of software houses - they're standards which improve code and application quality, and are relevant to anyone learning software development today.
Useful in that it confirmed my own opinions on the topic, which is always nice, but could have been a little more technical, maybe featuring some code samples or techniques to create pretty URLs.
Some interesting ideas, delivered well despite what sounded like a nasty cold!
Communicated well, and the subject of the session looked impressive. Once criticism would be that maybe it would be worth trying to work with the other teams involved in PEAR aggregation, rather than competing with them.
Really enjoyed the talk - I felt that everything I'd need to know to get started with Behat was covered. Ben's presentation style is good, very easy to listen to, and he clearly has a passion for the subject which made the session engaging.
A really useful talk, very practical and full of real-world examples. I left with loads of ideas. The speaker was good, very clear and focused.
A good primer on the topic. Was hoping for some code samples, or some more explicit hints towards how to write extensions (e.g. a more in-depth explanation of macros) - perhaps would make a good session for the tutorial day in future? The speaker was great as usual, the talk was paced well.
As someone who has only a passing knowledge of ZF1 it was pitched quite well, as it didn't rely on the audience having a great amount of experience with the framework. Maybe would have been better keeping the questions until the end, as a couple derailed the talk; if they'd come up at the end it would have been easier to resolve them. Good presentation style, and easy to understand.
Presentation was enjoyable and the speaker presented his talk very well, but the content of the presentation could have done with more (real-world) benchmarks. Some examples of the performance improvements for other often-used packages would have been a bonus.