PHP UK Conference 2013
21 - 23 Feb 2013 at The Brewery

First time I saw Julien in action. It was in depth and liked it a lot. This talk went beyond the basic level and showed the crowd how memory management is done in PHP and on the operating system.

I learned a couple of things, so mission accomplished.

There was only one thing missing: a sort of conclusion and an answer to the question how we can actually optimize our memory consumption in PHP. A couple of pointers there would make a perfect ending to a great talk.

This is not the first time I've seen Rowan speak. Every talk has something special to it and again this proved to be the case.

The first time I see a talk that consists entirely of screenshots. Very gutsy and risky, but delivered oh so well. Good job!

Ian is one of my favourite conference speakers: he is *VERY* technical and knows his stuff. The delivery is always top notch.

This talk was no different. Looking forward to see Ian present again.

Aral is a good presenter and adds lots of drama to his talks. I like this very much. The "real life" examples add to that. It's cool to see that these examples come from every day life.

I have seen Aral present a couple of times and some of the ideas are recycled from other talks. This is not necessarily bad, but removes a bit of the magic.

But hey who cares: something that was good the first time I saw it, can be just as good the second time.

Now that I've seen this talk a couple of times, I am very curious to see something brand new from this great speaker/performer.

A good talk, especially for developers who are new to usability. Although, for someone who's read a few Jakob Nielsen articles it didn't offer much that's new.

Obviously it's important not to forget the lessons learned over the years, and fun to look at some obviously bad sites, but it would be good also to get insight into more current questions: should password fields be in plaintext? Any pitfalls with responsive design? How to avoid pitfalls like xkcd.com/1174. etc.

The discussion about some surprising decisions in Facebook and Gmail design was good, and so was the audience participation.

Good content, well delivered - everyone should be doing this!

As a philosophy, "planning to fail" is an excellent way of approaching a complex solution with multiple working parts.

David delivered a great talk, with a lot of background on the issues Hailo have encountered. The Netflix "chaos monkey" was brought into great context; good advice was given on how we might apply this ourselves.

Sebastian is an excellent speaker who clearly knows his stuff; he delivers with excellent authority and humour.

Oh, and the content was perfect - excellent advice that should be second-nature and almost never is...

Lots of information crammed in there; good context and confident delivery; most of the question answering at the end was excellently handled.

I feel that if I wasn't already aware of the technologies described and their upsides that I would have gotten a lot more from the talk than I did.

It's a tough act to pull off, delivering an anti-talk. Martijn started out in the right fashion, but his dry delivery made his salient points harder to spot. Initially he started out putting blue, cloudy skies behind the truth, but that convention disappeared fairly quickly.

As a talk to make one think about one is being told, it was fantastic. So long as people realised he wasn't serious for most of it - I hope everyone in the room did. I really hope so. - it was actually quite thought-provoking in that it caused us to analyze everything he said, and take each part with a pinch of salt.

With more clarity as to what was bad and good advice, this talk would have gone down a storm.