Talk comments

Anonymous at 09:15 on 10 Oct 2011

Thisj is a wonderful presenter, the energy in the room was markedly more charged than all of the other talks. One thing I did think though was that energy sometimes got a little frenetic, and the audience felt obliged to talk over Thisj, second guess his examples and undermine him at points which I though unfair.

I have very little experience of building for CLI, or using it from scratch - my experience comes from using others work. This was a wonderful introduction, and glance at advanced usage and techniques. His way of giving examples of code that he hasn't found a use for yet was great to introduce the methods therein, and inspire the audience to find use for it and get their minds working.

An excellent job of running through 'the other SAPI' and charging the audience with inspiration. Really enjoyed it.

I liked the location, but indeed, the music was quite loud. Had a good time there talking to people :)

Anonymous at 09:10 on 10 Oct 2011

The code slides were useless, we could have done with some zooms in key parts of them to cement their application. It felt more like a hurried tour through the getting started section of symfony.com rather than a practical look.

I personally would have appreciated more high level explanations of concepts, that illegible examples of code. Symfony's architecture and nuances are very different to other PHP frameworks, but more akin to other none PHP ones, it would have been great to understand the methodology behind the majore design choices and practical applications.

One other point (from my limited understanding) is that some of the examples were pretty out of date, config file formats have changed and the codebase in the examples was using deprecated methods in the stable release.

Having said that though, I did glean some useful tips on setting up, making use of the different parts of Symfony and how and where to apply them. And I'm now very excited about going to Cologne for Symfony day, so thank you Stefan.

Anonymous at 09:04 on 10 Oct 2011

Great stuff. Practical examples of how the technology can help, and how it can also hinder which is equally as valuable. I appreciate that the technical feat of achieving such a velocity of traffic for 'a major high street retailer' is huge, it would perhaps have been better to show that feat as a comparison to the traffic before Varnish.

Time permitting, it would have also been great to hear a bit more about the load balancing that Varnish does between servers, and what it takes to set that up.

Looking forward to poring over the slides and having a good go at tweaking my own configurations though: inspring stuff.

Sebastian covered all the basics of metrics by explaining CC and NPATH which was a perfect fit for the audience as far as i can tell.

I was very happy about the mention of Sonar and getting to hear about the progress that has been made there

Personally I'd have explained CC and NPATH first and CRAP after that so I'd be clear to everyone what CC is but showing the "useful result" first also worked out well. My suggestion for showing off CRAP would be to include a graph like http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3615626/crap-index-overview.png so people maybe get a easier grasp on the number.

Really enjoyed the first talk of I've seen from Sebastian and looking forward to more!

Anonymous at 08:59 on 10 Oct 2011

Obviously Sebastian is biased, and while I appreciate the good will that goes into demonstrating that 'other frameworks are available' they were cast aside immediately after presenting them. I think perhaps his time would have been better spent giving us a rundown of the tools he would suggest and how to use them; so long as that was accompanied by a disclaimer that they are his preference I think that's fine.

One other point was that perhaps his tone was a little dry, and I didn't feel like he was as interested in his talk as I was.

Overall though, a great insight into the thought process of a chap who's leading the charge on testing in PHP.

Anonymous at 08:54 on 10 Oct 2011

REST is one of those things people take for granted a bit - just plug this in here, and that there will give you a meaningful result. It's great to get a decent overview of a great deal of it's inner workings and capabilities.

Could have perhaps used some more cursory request / response slides to see his points in situ. Having said that though, the timescale was fairly unforgiving for such a wide ranging subject.

Anonymous at 08:51 on 10 Oct 2011

Spot on for a keynote: it was really inspiring and broke down a great many of the perceived barriers between what we're doing day to day and what those are doing at the forefront. Ian did a great job of translating his messages into a hybrid graspable metaphors and technical specifics.

Excellent keynotes can set the tone for a whole conference and this one did definitely deliver. It's the first keynote by Ian that I've seen and I'm impressed.

Good keynotes make you listen for the whole time even and point out a new viewpoint to people that haven't been 'around' for at least 10 years. The speaker managed to do so and started of PHPNW11 very well!

I thought that the why in this talk was just as important as the how, after all why would you compile PHP down to .Net? Having the background reasoning for this was very needed. It could however have been glossed through a bit quicker. The enthusiasm did seem to be a bit lacking, which did make the first part seem a bit slow, but I think this was more to do with the speaker being a bit nervous about giving the talk.

I hope that they stick with it though because developers need to not be blinded into one technology due to personal preference.