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

I think the discussion could have been a very emotive, involved affair, but fell very flat. I'm not entirely sure how the audience got into the mood it did, but when the Twitterfall becomes the main event then you have to worry.

It's a shame, because in the middle of it there were a couple of salient points.

An excellent presentation containing many salient points and information; this stuff should really be web engineering 101 but it's great to have the points hammered home.

My one (tiny) gripe was that Ilia spent some time on pointing out DNS resolution slowdowns but didn't mention any solutions (such as DNS pre-fetching in browsers).

An excellent presentation; it took me back to my university group project on machine learning. As an anatomy of a real-world tool it was put into context marvelously, and Andrei was very clear on the finer points. Got me itching to get stuck back into it myself, which is the sign of a great presentation.

Dave covered a lot of content in a short period of time; while the delivery was perhaps a little too fast it contained a lot of good, solid, sensible stuff.

A good presentation of what's coming up; interesting to get more background on the Password API which suddenly looks more useful to me.

I'm not sure I liked some of the news that was delivered, but perhaps that's more to take up with the Core team as a whole...

While sometimes it was difficult to know wether or not Martijn was being ironic or not, I really enjoyed the anti-advice. Refreshing to hear his thoughts about "doing things your way" instead of playing the ever-popular "best practices" ball. While I think best practices has it's place, I definitely think people should pick the ones that are useful for the situation instead of applying everything all the time - just because "it's best practice".

I was probably guilty of not reading the extract, but the title "Advanced JavaScript Techniques ..." promised much about structuring code, low-level advances in the field of JS etc. However, it was primarily just a talk on Meteor.js; as such there was just too much detail in there.

As the previous commenter (Knut) says, the title might have been better if it mentioned frameworks or "An Introduction to Meteor"

Apart from that, Sebastian clearly knew what he was presenting, and he came across informatively.

My main thought during this talk was: I'm doing this wrong! I will now go back and take a good look at my own monitoring dashboards and apply some of Lorenzo's lessons.

An excellent talk from Aral; witty, well delivered and presented with a very impassioned conclusion.

I've been using VMWare for development environments for a while now, but it's good to see how a tool like Vagrant is evolving to simplify this process and how people use it in practice. Jeremy was honest about the fact that it's not perfect yet, but I'm looking forward to seeing wider adoption of this technique... and hopefully VMWare support in Vagrant soon!