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

By the end of the conference it was getting a bit of an in-joke about the constant mentioning of Joind.in, but if you'd been in Lorna's talk you'd have a different perspective on why this was such a good thing.

It wasn't just the content of the talk, but the enthusiasm with which it was delivered. The fact that the room was half filled with other speakers pays testament to the fact that not only does Lorna know what she's talking about, but she's able to share not just the knowledge but the enthusiasm with her audience.

Stefan knows his stuff.

I've been considering doing a talk at a conference and Stefan's talk made me not only realise I had no idea how hard what these guys do actually is, but also that I definitely want to do it.

This talk was short, and sweet. The speaker managed to fit into a short time span enough information for me to understand that I had been considering the wrong path for a major project I'm working on. Not only that but I made sure that I spent two hours after I got home from the free bar, in conference calls changing the business plan. Not just informational, but inspiring. I'd love to hear him give a longer talk on this.

A good introduction to the world of Doctrine 2, did feel the talk could have gone in to a bit more detail of some the deeper features of doctrine 2. Juozas' speaking style and sense of humor were great, and made the talk more enjoyable.

The thing that made this a great keynote for me was that the speaker knew some very well founded principles.

What he based it on was that we are not doing anything new, we are building upon what came before us. Yet we don't always know where it was that it came from. Our industry has a lot of history, yet we are often misguided into thinking that we're ground breaking.

Every person working in the web in any way whatsoever should do two things. They should watch this keynote, and then they should listen to the advice in it and go out and learn our history. It will only make you a better developer.

I think Rob is an excellent tutor, there's no doubt about that aspect of it. However I don't think the tutorial he gave was properly suited to the audience it was given to. The class consisted of about 1/3 people who could go straight in at the "high end" level that Rob took the tutorial along at, about 1/3 that could just about keep up and 1/3 (including myself) that were out of their depth very quickly. This is absolutely *not* a criticism of Rob or his tutoring style. Given that what he was trying to teach hasn't even been pushed to Beta yet he was able to carry forth the theoretical side of his tutorial day with pretty much every single person understanding what he was telling them.

I think that what would however improve this tutorial would have been to walk the class through the exercises showing them how to practically do what he was explaining. The method of talking about theory and then leaving people to put that in to practise worked well for the 1/3 that could do it anyway, but pushed the third in the middle and left the bottom third sat there wondering what was going on. This also meant that those 1/3 were not able to leave with working examples on their own laptops.

Again though, given how bleeding edge this stuff is, I think Rob did a very good job.

Nice overview of some key features to zf2, nice introduction

Another really excellent talk, I especially liked the Kano model stuff, which I'm sure is going to be particularly useful for me. I was also really impressed with Rohan's ability to shift the tone of the talk from fun, to a more serious delivery style depending on the material being covered at the time. I hope that if anyone saw my talk and then immediately saw this one will have had some of the dots joined up!

I think this man is someone to watch out for. His talk was funny and clear. What people are saying above me are all valid points. The slides were a little long ( from the back you couldnt see the last bullets, but i am short). I hope you saw the Conference Speaking 101 by Stefan, i think taking some pointers from that will improve your speaking alot!

(disclaimer - guy's my colleague)

I always enjoy talks that have a personal touch and a story, something you can't get from just reading a blog post for example. So, being able to see Ben explain the reasoning he had gone through for his false starts really helped my understanding. Interestingly, I think the live demo was the best part - actually seemed far more comfortable talking through those bits than on the slides.