PHP South Africa
26 - 29 Sep 2017 at Allan Gray, V&A Waterfront

@Christopher Pitt
Thank you for taking the time to give such detailed feedback. I appreciate it

If you felt that my presentation was just "long talk about Composer command-line parameters and configuration" then you are correct that you are not the target audience and have missed the point. My apologies for not making this clearer in the talk's blurb. If I present this again, I'll try to better include attendees like you

This is the first time I've presented this topic in this format and I agree that keeping the involvement over a two hour duration is challenging. I did try vary style and pacing to help with this, but I will take your advice in terms of incorporating more differences in kind. I don't feel that demo's dont really fit this content though.

The only last help I can give now is to recommend that you dont come to my presentation on Design Patterns on Friday. It is also a information rich presentation on a niche topic in a similar style. If you didnt enjoy this presentation, you probably wont enjoy that one.

Thanks for this. Will definitely help me make better dissensions with my career. thanks man!

Link to slides for upcoming talk later today. [https://www.slideshare.net/EtienneMarais2/open-sourcable-tools-in-any-environment]

Link to github project for resources lists and notes [https://github.com/etiennemarais/phpsouthafrica-2017]

Very informative. Much wow.

Firstly, thanks for the informative talk. I sadly had to leave early so I missed the parts I really wanted to hear but that is no fault of yours.

If I could give one piece of constructive feedback, expecting every attendee of your workshop to be running the same OS as you and therefore being able to install the same software as you are is, I feel, a little short sighted. Based on the fact that Laravel offers many options in setting up a development environment and web server, it might be useful to have dedicated a single slide to setting things up on alternative systems.

I appreciate that you cannot dedicate time in your workshop for all the different set ups, so maybe even an explanation of the requirements for the workshop in the workshop description may have been useful.

Otherwise a great workshop, thank you.

I am glad MS is now in OSS space, wishing some Azure services can be FOSS.

It was fantastic...give me confidence to break it even further

Only wish Microsoft allowed me to log in so that I could do this workshop with you.

Before I get into things; I was clearly not the target audience for this talk. I could tell that from reading the abstract, and it's no fault of yours that I chose to attend this workshop; so please take this feedback in the context that presents.

I felt that this talk was extremely dry. I battled to pay attention, and the lack of interactive demos (even pre-recorded demos would have been fine) made this difficult. Audience participation helped offset this a little, but after an hour without typing, the audience seemed not to want to participate that much anymore (and by participate I mean put hands up).

It's not that workshops need live demos. It's that this one had nothing for attendees to do. There were no instructions for people following along (like "ok, let's install this bit of software so we can see how it works..."). It was just an extremely long talk about Composer command-line parameters and configuration variables.

For folks having only ever run install or update commands: this talk may be difficult but informative. It could be improved by involving attendees in some sort of example project.

For folks who use composer every day: this talk may be difficult and not entirely beneficial. It doesn't feel like the topic is exactly right for a workshop, in its current form. It could be improved by showing how to do things like create composer plugins or studying how different large projects arrange their dependencies or architecture (as relates to composer, like "how do Laravel and ZF arrange their dependencies and when does each strategy pay off...").

A smaller point: you seemed super nervous (understandable) and it carried through to your speech. Particularly in the use of "um" and "ah". It didn't distract too much from the content, but it could possibly be improved by _even more_ rehearsal or recording and listening to the post-first-hour content (when the effect became exaggerated).

This was loads of fun. I'm excited to try and create a chat bot, and thanks to the examples and references to tools I can use, I know where to start.

I don't have any meaningful criticisms of the workshop, but I do have a comment about the venue. It seems like the head-count wasn't matched to the number of chairs in the room; so a few people had to wait for quite a while to get seats and table-tops to work on. I get that there can be a certain number of people one assumes will give the workshops a miss, and that having to bring new chairs in isn't the end of the world; but the venue took so long to do it that they were making distracting table set-up noises 40 minutes into the talk. That's distracting for the speaker (who did a great job of concentrating nonetheless) and attendees trying to join in and/or concentrate on the workshop.

I believe it's the first time the conference is at this venue, so it's natural to have some first-time issues; and I want to stress that I don't think the conference or speaker could have done any better here. Purely a venue-related thing.

[I'll cross-post this to the general conference comments, but I wanted to say it here for context]