PHP North West 2016
30 Sep - 2 Oct 2016 at Manchester Conference Centre

This was an interesting talk about the history of PHP and where it ranked at different times compared to other platforms, but it was not what I was expecting. I expected an analysis of likely alternatives that popular sites would have been written in had PHP not been around.

Great talk! Some interesting uses of RabbitMQ. Wish there was something on the PECL extension though as the last time I tried a userland AMQP PHP implementation, there were real performance issues. Not sure if this has been resolved yet though.

Superb from start to finish, 6 out of 5. Gary is great on stage - his delivery was spot on and even with the multitude of laughs in it, there were some very serious messages coupled with disarming honesty and openness. Watching this again when the videos come out :)

It's always good to hear about better ways to decouple code and business logic from other areas of your code, but unfortunately this talk consisted pretty much of "Interfaces are good, use them" and that was it really. I was really surprised that we were at the end of the talk after 15 minutes - I would have liked to see some more real-world use cases and examples of how you can take highly-coupled code and the approaches you'd take to gradually decouple it. Feels more like a lightning talk at the moment.

Having just pushed out a beanstalkd solution based on a talk from last year's PHPNW conference, I came along to this talk to hear how RabbitMQ does it - and as usual with Lorna's talks I came away with lots more ideas, details and knowledge around queueing in general as well as the RabbitMQ-based detail. Well presented, just the right amount of information, and I'll definitely be considering RabbitMQ for future use.

Very good talk - well presented and engaging. Given me some different views to take away and use when reframing problems or approaches. Bonus points for your "use all the array functions", you are a brave man ;-)

Aisha's presentation was superb - even more so for being her first! Totally engaging from the start, and really refreshing to hear a "from the outside" talk as she spoke about her experience getting into the tech industry. Often it's easy to forget about some of these items on your own journey but Aisha brought these totally to the fore. Superb!

I came to the talk expecting a real from-the-start introduction to Expressive from someone who hasn't used anything Zend Framework-related for a number of years. The talk started out well, but there were IMHO too many references to Rob Allen's Slim talk earlier in the day which I hadn't attended, and it made me feel like I'd missed out on maybe something crucial. Following the introduction of what the various components were, what middleware was and a bit of example Expressive code, the talk went into the integration of Doctrine and all of a sudden there were lots of Zend-related items that I had no clue about (ConfigProviders? Stuff with Zend Form?). I think either there was too much in this talk, or it should be reframed as a talk for those who have already got some Zend Framework experience and that stuff can be glossed out. But James's speaking style is very easy to listen to and I definitely took some interesting bits away :)

At last some of the intricacies of HTTPS, TLS and similar make a lot more sense. Technical but the details were good to understand if you do any sort of work over a secure connection. I particularly enjoyed the just-right explanations of the key steps in establishing a connection with TLS (eg client creates random number, server does the same) without going too much into the really gnarly details. Thanks!

I enjoyed this talk, and Ben is definitely an engaging speaker. I'd agree with some of the other comments that the "punchline" was a bit missed here and/or glossed over, but really enjoyed the reminiscing back to the early days (.php3 files, totally).