PHPNW 2014
3 - 5 Oct 2014 at Manchester Conference Centre

I like talks like this, people always assume they know all the new features of a release so skip them but there's always something that slipped past you.

a good topic to start the conference off.

Interesting talk, and well presented, but could do with a little more energy in the presentation to get people a bit more fired up.

Really enjoyed this, good inspiring way to end the conference.

This is a tough one to rate.

As a "Refactoring 101", it was a great talk, delivered very well, demonstrating good practice for refactoring. The idea of boy scouting is my new favourite way of telling people to not make things worse when they're working with old code. For that talk you get 5 stars.

The problem is that the talk given didn't match the abstract or the talk title. In terms of the talk title, there was nothing in this talk to help bring your application into 2004, let alone 2014. The principles are sound, but I've seen code like the example this started with 10 years ago, and refactored it in the style shown just a couple of years later.

The abstract mentions "This includes eradicating singletons and reducing the dependencies of our unit tests (no need to connect to a DB any more!)". I was particularly interested in this talk because we have a very large test suite that does connect to the database, and it takes minutes to run. But there was no mention of this refactoring, or unit tests, other than it being essential to write tests before you start refactoring.

Oh and in pedantry corner: "Thank you" is two words.

Great talk about the experiences upgrading to PHP 5.5. I'm not sure we will hit a lot of the problems mentioned, but great to understand the general process you went through.

When I look back at the abstract, I was quite disappointed with this talk.

I fully agree with the need to keep production and development as close as possible, but I feel this was undermined right at the start by saying that and then immediately saying you should use a Mac. Macs are great, I use one, but no one uses Macs in production, and it seemed like that should transition into a discussion of using Vagrant to replicate production.

Instead, there was a lot of talk about tools to help automate installation of things on a Mac, which again, I was really interested in because I manage a team of 14 developers with 11 Macs between them, but there was no mention of how to actually automate these things, other than a single slide that showed an ansible command to run to configure the Mac, with no further explanation of it. That was the key bit of the whole talk for me. I want to know more about that.

As far as I recall, there was no mention of deployment with Capistrano, Capifony and friends either.

In the end it was just a list of useful things to go and look up later, but I feel the talk missed opportunities by not emphasising key points like "This is what you use to actually automate your Mac setup".

Liked the design of the slides which meant that I can go over them later and see bullet points containing what was said, but were skipped during the presentation.

The talk was quite quick, but I guess it had to be due to the time constraints. More time was spent on the newer features which makes sense. It was a good recap over some of the new features which I've forgotten/wasn't quite aware of how worked. The examples of usage were helpful.

Good talk, thanks!

Got off to a really good start with the Lego illustration, but then seemed to dig too much into detail of diagraming things in UML in the second half.

Felt to me it would have been better to stick at the higher level with some more abstract examples about fitting Software Architecture into Agile Methodologies (which is something we are wrestling with at work, with 3-4 scrums all working on the same code base but little overall architecture design)

Great and interesting content. We've been doing code reviews for a while in work, but this talk has given me some good ideas to improve on the process.