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

This talk gave a few good ideas on how to quickly start modernising an old application.

Adding events to a legacy application may prove very useful.

Chris did a good job of making a complex subject seem within the bounds of a regular Joe bloggs. I got it to a certain point, but felt that a stepped through code+data approach would have helped.

It's a subject I'll persue further, and I hope when I follow his code it'll fill in those gaps.

I am clearly in the minority here but I did not like this talk one bit. I feel it would be unfair of me to rate it a 1 and then not explain myself, so here goes...

There are two main reasons.

Firstly, I found the talk and the manner in which it was delivered to be offensive, and I do not use that word lightly. Sexism == bad. Guess what? I already knew that before the conference even started. With that in mind the general tone of the presentation made me feel like I was being talked down to and came across at times as extremely patronising, condescending and sometimes accusatory. I do not deny that there is a problem with sexism in our industry (the numbers you presented do not lie) but it is not something that I have personally ever taken part in or witnessed, so to sit through a talk where I am being told that sexism is bad (which I already know!) was a frustrating waste of my time and I found it insulting to my intelligence that a speaker would need to lecture on this point.

Frankly it felt a little like being at school or having someone from my HR department tell me off. This could have been fixed by spending less time labouring the point about how sexism is evil and spending more time than you did on how we might fix this problem and more practical steps that we could all take today. In the end the talk felt more like a rant than something that I could learn from.

The second major problem that I had with this talk was that it dwelt on sexism far too much when the topic of the talk was supposed to be about diversity and there are many other equally important diversity issues than just sexism.

I was very pleased that you mentioned mental health as I think this is an extremely important issue with a lot of unnecessary stigma attached to it but it was only a brief mention and racism and ageism barely got a few passing comments. Further, there was no reference that I noticed to the problems faced by LGBT people, which is a crying shame as I have worked in "professional" environments where LGBTs were casually denigrated almost daily. The talk could definitely have benefited from widening in scope to a more general diversity and inclusion talk which I think would have been a lot more powerful and wouldn't have subtracted from any anti-sexism message.

As someone already said the general tone was quite dispiriting and in my view this made it a bad choice for an opening keynote session, it did not get me motivated for the rest of the day, if anything it was the opposite. I applaud you for trying to address an important issue but just wish it had been approached in a different manner and I feel it was a missed opportunity for other minorities.

As has already been said this talk was a great way to close the conference and hopefully inspires a few more PRs on some open source projects. Thank you!

This was a fun talk with quite a bit of energy and some really good examples. I'm not sure if the vim example was a massively useful one for most people but it was the coolest and has inspired me to go and do a bit of research on that.

I felt that at the end you mentioned there are some things that should not be automated, and while I can think of a few, it would have been good to hear you say it.

There was even an XKCD comic included :)

The comic-book metaphor was maybe a little stretched (as you acknowledged) but it was very entertaining.

That said I am not sure that the talk fully met its purpose. I understand that you were not trying to explain git-flow to the audience, but rather explain to them a way that they might explain it to colleagues, etc, but I don't know how easily reproduceable the information would be for someone to actually do that.

This was a good talk though and your speaking style was excellent. As one of the other commenters already wrote you have a lot of energy, some of the other speakers could definitely learn a thing or two from watching you!

Some good practical points about not being too keen to jump on the latest cool thing which I think a lot of people could learn from. It was great to have a bit of a recap of some of the different development methodologies/techniques, all to easy to forget about them when they aren't the ones you're using!

This was a truly fantastic talk. The subject matter was delivered knowledgeably, informatively, clearly and at just the right pace.

I already have an existing Docker setup and had previously tried Kubernetes to manage it, however this did not go so well. You have definitely taught me that it can be easy and have inspired me to have another go at it!

Good talk where I learnt a couple of interesting things that I didn't already know despite using Vagrant for a while. I didn't previously know about all the plugins that you mentioned such as cachier and I didn't know that there was an AWS provider for Vagrant, how exciting!

This talk was a gem in the conference. Your speaking style was very clear and confident. The talk was definitely an upbeat whilst thought provoking start to the whole day.

I particularly enjoyed your use of the emojis and cat face to demonstrate how the Imposter Syndrome can have a different effect on people of visible minorities.