PHP UK Conference 2016
18 - 19 Feb 2016 at The Brewery

This talk wasn't what I expected, in that it lacked for technical detail (I'm fairly new to SVN). That said, it was still a very useful talk and Tess was an enthusiastic and engaging speaker.

A fascinating development in MySQL, which will be really useful going forwards I'm sure. Morgan kept my interest throughout the talk, and handled a slight roasting on benchmarks with good humour.

A really interesting talk that gave me some ideas about how I might apply machine learning going forward. Chris is an engaging speaker and used an appropriate level of humour in the talk.

The only thing missing was a little background on statistical probability and (specifically) significance testing, which would be a useful way of ensuring differences in use of specific tags are genuine.

I'd say that this talk was one of the highlights of this year's PHP UK and has changed my answer to the question of 'is docker ready for production yet' from a no to a maybe.

Good talk and a good introduction to the topic. Might have been a bit mathsy for first thing in the morning, but that isn't the speaker's fault. A tip for any conferences using this talk in the future: put it after the morning coffee break!

Hands down the best talk I went to. Well presented, held my attention, and an interesting topic.

Chris has a great way with words (it's very obvious that his acting experience helps here!), and injected plenty of humour into this talk. The demos weren't perfect, but if anything, that added to the charm. Great to see that this was a PHP-specific talk, and I learned a lot about how basic machine learning works - and I'll be looking to put this into practice in projects in the future.

Good talk - plenty to take in with regards to dealing with our legacy code!

Great talk, and very well presented. There didn't seem to be much talk of elasticity (other than 'we're looking to do this soon', which is fine!) but what was there was some fantastic stuff about managing services well. It was very fast-paced with little depth on each topic, but it's given me plenty to go away, research and try to implement.

I felt that this talk was perhaps not the best way to open the conference. While I appreciate some of the sentiment, a more positive talk (like the closing keynote!) would have been a much more uplifting start.

This presentation is clearly borne out of some difficult experiences for the presenter, and I did feel that some level of bitterness came across which soured the actual content for me somewhat. The presentation felt a little bit condescending, and the over-use of emotive words like 'gross' and 'disgusting' felt a bit pushy.

My take on this is that we need to do more to make the software industry welcoming, that's undeniable. But all of the discussion of quotas - 25% women being bad - made me uncomfortable. We should be meritocratic and hire the best people for the job, whatever their race, gender or disability. To me, if we have the best people, it shouldn't matter what proportion of them come from those various groups.

Overall, good content, and I'd've been glad to see this presentation - not as the keynote - elsewhere in the schedule, though maybe from a more 'birds-eye-view' than 'from-the-trenches' as it was.