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

My favourite talk of the day, it was educational, funny and well balanced. Although the speaker was nervous, it didn't matter as the content was still delivered well, and precisely. It was refreshing to object oriented principles being explained along with a simple example everyone could relate too.

Particularly enjoyed the explanations on the downsides of writing good boring code, more typing and time but the benefit is simple, reasonable and understandable code - and of course the trustworthy beard.

A nice clear and concise overview of the benefits and changes in PHP7 over PHP5. Felt a little rushed in places, but there was lot's to cover so this was understandable. Good talk!

This had the potential to be a good talk, however somewhere along the way, something was lost. In my opinion, this talk certainly should not have been the Keynote. I believe that, as the first talk that everybody is attending, the keynote should be lively, inspiring and suitable for the whole audience. The speaker made reference to the generalization that the audience were "getting older" multiple times, almost as if this was a bad thing or something to feel ashamed of. And yet, this talk was clearly geared toward the older generation of PHP programmers, with all the irrelevant 'trips down memory lane' and in-jokes with friends in the audience, many of which would have been entirely lost on younger programmers due to a lack of explanation or cohesive 'point' being made. This talk had the potential to much more than it was, but unfortunately, ended up falling far short of the mark.

Excellent speaker, enthusiastic and passionate about his talk. To be fair, I didn't know what to expect from this talk, but was pleasantly surprised to see it was standard introduced to mitigate cross scripting attacks - always enjoy learning something new.

The live demo was entertaining - and brave. However the talk didn't persuade me to move from AWS Elastic Beanstalk to Google App Engine.

Interesting to hear about the use of firebase, and the disadvantages of realtime reporting.

Speaking as a developer starting out in the industry, I found this talk a little confusing. I understood the main point of the talk which was if there was no php, then the world would be very different but you could say this about anything in life.

Apart from that, all I heard was a quick overview of old technologies and jokes with his friends in the audience. As for saying the PHP world is aging, im 26 and saw quite a few younger people in the building as well.

Poor keynote.

I was disappointed with this talk, and felt it was poor choice for the keynote. It was depressing, vague nostalgic rhetoric. The services, and products which exist now, would still exist in some manner, as those ideas would of just been implemented by someone else in another probably less fun, and pragmatic language. The focus should of been on why and how PHP enabled the world to develop, and how it can continue to make development accessible.

There was no explanations on why PHP became more popular, than Python, Perl and JAVA.
No references to how to improve and contribute to the PHP community, just simply adding documentation can have a positive impact.
Didn't understand the reference to the audience being older then expected? Was the speaker insinuating that PHP use is declining? - why?
Why bring up the PHP internals free-for-all chaos, that problem is only with a small few.
The PHP-FIG project should of been explained more, ignoring the politics - it does have a very clear trajectory: toward more community participation and robust standards.

Thanks Tobias, I have nothing to add that hasn't already been covered. An interesting point when you are demoing is to use the presentation assistant plugin (https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7345). It shows your key combos on screen when you press them. It can make your IDE laggy for the first 30 seconds or so, it's worth starting the IDE before you start actually demoing. I'm not sure if there are bugs in refactoring, I'll look into that today, but you handled the problems well.

Great talk, gave us lots to think about during our imminent upgrade to PHP 7.

I enjoyed the talk but thought it was a little light on content - I'd like to hear more about how diversity can be fostered if this would become a full length talk. Thanks Mark.