PHP UK Conference 2014
21 - 22 Feb 2014 at The Brewery

Good talk. Expressing business rules in the language of the business ... good idea.

Presented by a fantastic entertainer with really great interactive slides. Even though the content really only contained some fairly basic computer science it seemed to be something new for most people in the room and if, like myself, this is stuff that you've not been working with on a day to day basis it provided and as a fun and exciting review.

Personally I'd like to have gone into more depth, particularly with the more complex algorithms but I think I was about as tied and Rowan at this point and therefore it probably wasn't the time for that :-)

Conclusion, as a slightly more "outside this box" talk for a PHP conference I think this fitted in perfectly for people who wanted something a bit more interesting and different while still being relevant.

Fantastic talk which I believe provided useful tips for ANYONE using ZF2. Obviously it has a limited audience however I feel that Gary made an extra special effort to make sure it was accessible to beginners but also provided depth and usefulness to people with an advance level of working with ZF2. There are things that I learnt in this talk which I will start applying straight away.

Great talk.

Have not really paid any attention to these tools in the past and sort of just chose this talk by random. Was a very clear explanation of how to get some good use out of this tool suite and while I don't think I'll be using it immediately it's now at the back of my mind and one day I think what I saw here will be extremely useful!

I was glad the slot for this talk was switch as it was the perfect way to end the conference. A very back-to-basics talk, which, judging by those I was with, also introduced some of the algorithms to those without a Computer Science background. It was entertainingly presented and having the code power the demonstration slides was a very nice (and confident - randomly fed data?!) touch.

Very clear talk and very good introduction to caching for people who are not familiar with it. Very much a beginner talk though, didn't really contain any advanced of intermediate stuff. Bonus points, I did enjoy hearing some of the techniques used by Digg in the past!

Extremely interesting, informative and useful talk. And having a speaker who clearly knows the subject inside out always helps. I'm not particularly a fan of allowing questions during a talk and it felt like those in this talk did break the flow a little bit at times, but I suppose when the talk is structured into sections it doesn't hurt too much.

Although this talk presumably aims to encourage people to try out Google App Engine, it didn't come over as a sales pitch. In fact, it felt no different to any talk explaining the virtues of some open source project.

I noted down a couple of questions along the way, then scrubbed them out as the next slide had the answer.

Ian and Mandy both gave good talks for their parts. I'm not terribly keen on two speakers (or two news presenters on BBC News 24!) as it never seems to add anything, but they didn't get in each others way or make an annoying double act. Mandy could possibly be audibly clearer at times, but that was a very slight issue.

The last talk slot before the closing address has the drawback of people coming into the room from other tracks during the Q&A. If it wasn't for this, and being a bit tired by then, I might have asked about the costs of app engine, how easy it is to predict and manage the costs, as this is an issue with any dynamic cloudy services.

Lots of useful information, particularly regarding Charles which I'll definitely be making use of. I aren't a fan of the style of presentation, which felt like sitting in on an audition for a children's TV presenter at times, but everything was conveyed clearly which is the main thing.