PHP North West 2011
7 - 9 Oct 2011
at Ramada Manchester Picadilly
Talk comments
Didn't quite get as much as I hoped to from this talk.
We're already using DocBlox, so we'd already covered most of the first half of the talk (and in our experience we've got a better than 80% improvement in documentation generation time over phpDocumenter). There were a couple of interesting nuggets about inheritable doc blocks and checkstyle format output that we'll definitely be incorporating into our usage, but the things I was interested in and were mentioned in the abstract, namely applying your own branding and managing your own set of tags weren't actually covered in the talk, beyond a mention of templating towards the end.
Mike did a good job of delivering the talk and is obviously passionate about the project and I thank him for doing it, it's so much better for CI to have brought build times down from 2 hours to 20 minutes.
Good overview of the subject, although I would have liked a little on how to integrate this into our CI environment. Lots of interesting tools mentioned, like Gherkin, Sahi and Zombie.js that give me plenty of food for thought to take back to work.
The videos of running the commands were a clever idea, much safer than live demos but achieves the same overall effect.
As said before, typos were a bit of an issue, you might want to search for "confernece" in your slides :)
Great party - nice to be able to sit for a little while after dinner before moving back into the exhibition room for drinks. Shame I couldn't make the most of it before my 10am Sunday talk!
A subject more deserving of a week's training than a half hour talk, but Paul presented the main topics clearly, discussed them well and kept things focussed and to the point throughout. I even learnt something new in respect of the injection attacks into the href attribute, and the only negative point to make is that I now have to start combing my code base to see if there are any vectors for that particular issue!
Most people agreed that this was one of the best talks, and with the experience of the speaker and backing of one of the biggest websites in the world that was no surprise. The talk was engaging, the topics consistently interesting and seeing a bit of code, however insignificant, pushed to Facebook in front of us was a great treat for geeks.
I enjoyed the talk and Clinton's approach to how it was presented. His code examples caused some controversy and from the talk's perspective it may have been better if he ended the discussion and continued the presentation, but he was making valid attempts to answer criticism. It was interesting to see the ever present disconnect between business and academia but I saw logic in most of his teaching decisions and he was clearly interested in bringing modern technology to his students, something which should be appreciated.
Stefan was clearly interested in the topic he was talking on, but the talk served more as a demonstration of setting up a project than an introduction to the framework, and this goal itself was hampered by the fact that it was very difficult to read any of the provided code examples. I came away with the impression that Symfony2 was an in depth framework, but I am unsure where that depth leads or what's actually present within. I did talk to Stefan in the evening and I think he's aware of the issues with the slides, so maybe just a different tactic next time would be ideal.
The talk was well thought out but presented in a dry manner, and seemed to revolve mostly around alternatives to PHPUnit that had already been decided as inferior. Could have done with a few alternative and maybe more complex examples, and a primer at the beginning giving a 5 min overview of unit testing to newer developers would have been a good touch,
Brilliant, inspiring talk. I'm always looking for new ways and tools to improve our development processes and to empower developers, and it looks like Facebook thinks the same ways but has the resources to write the systems themselves, and brilliantly, open source them for the rest of us.
Hope to get the slides and present this to my team during conference slide karoake (hint hint Scott!)
Good food, plenty of seating (although the extra seating behind the curtain between the food serving points wasn't terribly obvious), much longer lasting free bar (which can't have been easy with so many more people!) and no loud music made it easy to catch up with people. Great work!