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

Much better than last year. The food was much improved and the one drink per badge per visit approach to the bar worked extremely well. Really liked that we were not sat along long tables like we were last year.

A good and enjoyable talk on a subject that is often ignored. Volker is a fun and engaging speaker but even having much more time than other sunday speakers I think he had too many slides and spent too long on each sub-topic. More focus on the key messages in each section and a 50%-60% reduction in slides and this talk would fit nicely into an hour (hopefully) without loosing Volker's "individual" style of presentation :)

Useful talk, introduced me to a few news tool I wasn't aware of before like Behat, and XHProf integration in PHPUnit.

I think I'd have preferred a little more about XHProf/PHPUnit integration than Atoum, simply because apparently Atoum's examples apparently don't work out of the box and the documentation is in French, so the performance testing stuff I could do with XHProf would have been much more useful than a buggy unit testing framework with no docs in the native language of most of the audience.

This talk could have been a useful introduction to git workflows, git-specific terminology and advanced git usage for developers comfortable with svn. Unfortunately I found it was actually a simple rehash of the basic tutorials available on the web (svn commit = git commit etc.) combined with (sometimes inaccurate) bashing of svn (e.g. branches are not expensive in svn, they just require a server connection).

While the content of the talk was disappointing I thought Stefan did well as a speaker and coped pretty well with the half-hour time slot. With a little less pro-git bias, more time and more content on advanced git usage I believe this talk could evolve to be well worth a slot on the Saturday.

Really drove home the important point - that metrics are tools and guides to help you understand areas that you may want to consider for refactoring, rather than being hard and fast points for things you MUST change.

Appreciated learning a bit more about what all the different metrics mean and how they can be combined.

Made me cry to think about the numbers our codebase's generate though :-p

Excellent talk to kick off the conference, really inspiring to think of all the work I could do with the stuff I know and was going to learn during the rest of the conference.

A very good talk from a quality speaker. This talk really should have been given more time but credit to Paul for managing to squeeze so much into the short timeslot :) I thought the examples he gave were some of the clearest I've seen on a number of well-known but often less-well understood attack vectors and he had some interesting points (such as [removed] protocol urls) that are often forgotten about.

I'm split.

On one hand, I fully understand the difficulty faced by instructors and tutors who have to accomodate a range of students from those with a programming background, to those who don't even know what a variable is. It can't be easy.

On the other hand, I can't help but feel that the students would benefit more if they were taught techniques and concepts, more closely resembling those used in industry. The talk very much reminded me of my days in university and the kind of teaching that myself and my peers received as students; I had prior programming experience, many did not. I recognised that much of what we were being taught was not useful in the real world and knew that many would leave university without the knowledge required to hit the ground running in industry.

With those worries aside, I still felt the talk was presented well and Clinton was open and honest about the reasons for teaching the material he was teaching. He also openly asked for feedback and collaboration to improve the course material, and for that, I think he deserves to be recognised as a good tutor.

An interesting talk that straddled both an introduction/sales pitch for DocBlox and some of its less well known features and soon-to-be-released additions. Mike is obviously passionate about his development and this comes across clearly and while I believe nerves hampered the start of his talk he settled into it pretty quickly. There are a lot of good reasons for using DocBlox and I recommend reducing the time in the talk dedicated to comparing DocBlox with other systems (as this info is easy to find out) and focus on the cool new and additional features it provides (including the low memory footprint and high speed) and where the project is heading in the near future.

An interesting topic, but I felt the talk lacked in the content necessary to keep the audience interested. For many in the room, there wouldn't have been anything new to take away from the talk.