PHP UK Conference 2012
24 - 25 Feb 2012 at Business Design Center

Much more enjoyable than the previous night. I still would have preferred somewhere quieter with more space, but I was still able to have really good conversations and move round all the people I wanted to see. Epic tab though, cheers!

Enjoyed this, good slides, good content. Always like seeing real examples of how companies are operating, e.g. you showed the actual deployment script, monitoring, etc. Inspiring to see the push to open source most of the solutions too. Need to go off and investigate HyperDB more to see how portable the library is away from WordPress.

Only negative point (and it's a small one) is that you were a bit restless when speaking and it was making the floor squeak, which was distracting.

This is made to look really pretty bad when you compare it to the night in The Union the next day. I feel this would have been much better if it was just free / paid drinks at the venue. At the conference social, I want to be able to talk with the people, catch up, mingle, etc. I can't do this if there's loud music, the room is packed, everybody is sweating and we're mixed in with random members of the public. By which I mean the people prostituting themselves on the dance floor. One of them even found a guy (not a PHP developer) bundled past us and pretty much started mating with each other on a pile of our coats. So... yeah, good entertainment but it's not why I go to a conference.

Worked fine. You had a mic this year, which was lacking last year. It was good having it in a nice open space with beer, rather than during the closing address.

Good mix of speaker, well helmed and controlled, interesting range of questions.

Delicious math and computer science. I want more content like this, you're forced to think. Definitely a distinctive Barberesque style evolving in the slides. The visualisation of the support vector was particularly good.

Loved it. Good mix of personal experiences, actual tools and processes being used inside Etsy, and general conceptual stuff. Presented in a way that made it easy to pick out bits that are relevant to me and I can take away to implement.

P.S. I did like it more though when you were "too mean".

Slightly slow start and nerves were showing. However, the pace picked up later as did the more direct relation to how this affecting coding. Especially at the end when you were answering questions, much more engaging. I would probably compress the beginning of the talk and focus more on how this affects the flow of work and ideas for making yourself more productive by switching into the right modes.

Definitely worth attending as Thijs is engaging and flexible in the way he presents. Content-wise, I think there were a lot of people in the room already doing fairly advanced stuff with cloud/dedicated platforms and wanted deeper detail rather than overview (I did). An improvement for me would have been some real-life examples of set-ups being used by clients and the problems or advantages of them. It also felt like it was much more cloud-focused than hybrid. Enjoyable though and I learned some things, but I know there are more crazy secrets hiding in your head and I wanted to hear some of them.

Relaxed style, lots of useful tidbits. Felt like it took a little while for the audience to get into it though. Nice scene setting though with the reminders about where PHP came from and why it is the way it is now.