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

I found the first half of the talk great. I found the latter half to be a bit of a rant and at some points I felt quite insulted by some of the comments the speaker made, despite having no relation to her.

Generally, I came out of it feeling like I'd just had a bollocking, despite doing nothing wrong.

Some good observations, however.

I really enjoyed this talk. Having had recent problems working with project managers, it was quite eye opening to project managers function and the things I'd been missing, which had harmed relationships with the project managers.

Similar to others, didn't feel the concept of the "Anti CMS". Interesting story though, but it was just that, a story.

Was a very good keynote. As others, very inspiring and motivating. Will definitely watch again.

I came into the course not knowing a lot on ZF2. I've got some posts by MWOP sitting in my Instapaper account but hadn't found the time to read them so I knew I would get a lot out of this course and I certainly did.

I liked how the theory was dispelled before applying that in the exercises, despite knowing about the initial 5.3 compulsories like namespaces. When coming to the autoloader, DI and event manager topics they were essential.

I liked doing the exercise and enjoyed consulting on the solution with Alex who sat next to me. I did find it difficult to recall the ZF2 API method calls and parameter requirements and ordering when generating the solution though. Was thinking if the slides were also available on the flash drive I could have use them to complete the exercise within the time limit given. Also, I think it would have benefitted me at least knowing that the completion of the first exercise was not going to be reused or built upon for the second, since I got lost trying to generate the static class loader code at the end.

I liked the style of your teaching, very calming and love that honesty when you don't know the answer.

Overall, I definitely know I walked away with a positive experience of ZF2 and how far the framework has come. I'm looking forward to the beta but I keep thinking of switching to Symfony 2 as no release date has been announced yet on when it will finally be out to the masses.

Thanks Rob

I came into the course not knowing a lot on ZF2. I've got some posts by MWOP sitting in my Instapaper account but hadn't found the time to read them so I knew I would get a lot out of this course and I certainly did.

I liked how the theory was dispelled before applying that in the exercises, despite knowing about the initial 5.3 compulsories like namespaces. When coming to the autoloader, DI and event manager topics they were essential.

I liked doing the exercise and enjoyed consulting on the solution with Alex who sat next to me. I did find it difficult to recall the ZF2 API method calls and parameter requirements and ordering when generating the solution though. Was thinking if the slides were also available on the flash drive I could have use them to complete the exercise within the time limit given. Also, I think it would have benefitted me at least knowing that the completion of the first exercise was not going to be reused or built upon for the second, since I got lost trying to generate the static class loader code at the end.

I liked the style of your teaching, very calming and love that honesty when you don't know the answer.

Overall, I definitely know I walked away with a positive experience of ZF2 and how far the framework has come. I'm looking forward to the beta but I keep thinking of switching to Symfony 2 as no release date has been announced yet on when it will finally be out to the masses.

Thanks Rob

Even understanding the difficulties to teach certain concepts to who is unfamiliar with programming and software development I think that some of it's decision should be revised.
PHP is such a particular programming language, so free and easy to pick up with by its DNA that simplify too much "in the wrong way" might be fatal.
Development solutions might end being a habit that hardly those person will lose in the future so we should try to enforce at least few simple best practices constraints. However in general I found the talk very interesting especially because it's been mainly based on Clinton's need of sharing his experience searching for others ideas too, in other words 100% open source style, my ideas for your ideas.

Not the first Thijs's talk I attended but for sure this is the one I liked the most. First of all I enjoy any "non conventional" use of PHP, when for non conventional I mean something that most of the people out there even don't know PHP is capable to, secondly I loved how Thijs kept the attention of the crowd interacting with it trying on the fly code snippets to prove that what it was saying was true.
I know it might sound like a high praise but yes, if you have the chance, it doesn't matter the topic, attend a talk delivered by him because it's worth it, in the worst scenario you can take out of it some good tips about how to deliver a talk in case you feel like giving yours at some point

BDD is rapidly taking its place into the common list of the developers best practices. I recently started to look into the different BDD frameworks out there so the idea of watch the talk describing a real use case popped in mind quite straight forward.
Well presented overview, nothing new about the concept itself but still worth the time spent listening. Now I can add one more to my list and eventually make my choice.

Disclaimer: we are colleague and we worked together on a big Magento based projects.

The most exiting thing for me about the talk has been watching the numbers as a result of the effort we, but mostly Alistair, put together to make that eCommerce flies. However I have also to remark how well Alistair presented the topic without hesitations, covering most of the relevant aspects and answering also with proper competence technical questions raised by the crowd.