PHP UK Conference 2015
18 - 20 Feb 2015 at The Brewery

An impassioned delivery of an important message. Suitably "preachy" at times - I suspect some of use need a bit of telling-off about how we occasionally malign one another. However, it was a bit repetitive; the same message said several ways began to grate a little after a while.

A well delivered talk. Perhaps a little more on what's useful to include in an application's log would have been welcome guidance. I was less interested in Kibana than the rest of that stack, so personally would have liked to have spent less time looking at how to use that.

This largely seemed aimed at developers creating packages, not consuming them, but consuming packages is pretty simple using Composer so that should come as no surprise. There were a few interesting titbits, but not much new for people who'd already spent the time to try to learn how to best use Composer.

Enjoyable talk with the code examples pitched just right.

I found the talk a little slow, and whilst it was a good introduction to the running theme for the conference - the importance of community - most of the advice could have been just as applicable to any community, not just one of PHP developers. Perhaps that was the point, but I don't recall that being stated explicitly.

Still, there's no doubt that we have a great community and we can all gain from further involvement in it; as a reminder of that the talk was good.

The talk was an excellent mix of the very funny personality that is Garry and something as (seemingly) dry as the OWASP top 10. I had a good laugh and learned a thing or two. One bit of advice I got from Josh Holmes that I, as a fellow hat wearer, have taken to heart: loose the hat. Even from the first row it was difficult to see your eyes. Other than that: would watch again.

As a speaker, I'd one day like to one dat come close to the level of calmness displayed by Beth. I also liked seeing a more introductory level talk. The PHP community is very diverse, this talk acknowledges that. While I'm pretty sure many of the audience knew at least 50%, there were a few gems in there for everybody. Giving an objective reason to coding styles was also refreshing.

As the PHP world moves more towards "Rethinking best practices" this talk played nicely into that mindset. With the ever growing demand of having more complex structures and procedures, the need to be able to reason about these things becomes increasingly difficult. The declarative style which Nate showed makes it infinitely more easy to do so. Other movements have tried to simplify this too, FP in general and JS tools like ReactJS. The fact that this was a visual representation of this concept was awesome.