PHP Yorkshire 2019
11 - 13 Apr 2019
at University of York
Talk comments
Good to hear something relevant to WordPress. Perhaps skimmed over the technical details a little too much - the code examples were sometimes difficult to follow.
Absolutely horrible. I loved it. Scored 4/20 and learned a lot.
Plenty of vegetarian options. Too much to eat!
Useful, practical, well paced, clearly explained. As someone who doesn't do testing (yet) it was accessible enough to understand the basics.
Valuable information, certainly good for experienced PHP developers, but might have been a little fast paced for newcomers.
Short and to the point. Good to hear about the code of conduct right at the start of the conference.
Absolutely a polarising talk, from both the subject matter and the delivery.
My summary, I personally loved this talk. I do see where others might not appreciate the delivery style, and I agree that the opinion of the talk is a bit TOO hard and fast on the whole idea of (paraphrasing) "use (A)GPL so your users keep their rights".
But like any rights movement, progress is mostly made by the zealots of a cause. Pushing everyone else higher for the better, even if their idea of "right" might never be wholly achieved.
On the delivery, I loved it. I'm not sure what to say if audience members took offence. "We did this. You did this." The power and impact of statements like that are exactly as they need to be. No, he is not saying to every person in the room "You built Facebook ergo you all should be in jail". Software is the cause and in my opinion WILL be the cause in future, of some of the worlds greatest atrocities that history will look upon at similar levels of the World Wars and other horrific events in history.
And as the talk states. Software doesnt randomly appear.
People. Write. Code.
The people in that room. Write. Code.
After the results of the Atom bomb. The entire world of scientists became highly regulated. Not because every scientist wanted to make an atom bomb, or the next black plague. But because they COULD.
Software development has nothing. We rely on the morals, the integrity, the defiance of people all over the world who are no different than the people in that room.
The licensing stuff is pretty much another talk in itself, as far as opinions on whether that is right and what could be added there. But the 2 halves are the perfect compliment to each other, they ask the "why?" and at least partly answer the "how?" for each other.
The world is bigger than 60 minutes on a stage. Distilling such a large topic, you have to throw away the asterisks and disclaimers.
We're all adults, we can take the values here, how they clash not only with the tech world but with society and politics as a whole, and apply them to our own moral compass as best we can.
Despite having disagreements with the absoluteness of certain parts of the talk.
I loved the content, and the delivery, which was exactly as loud and aggressive as I think it needed to be.
Agree with others that the pacing could be a bit faster. Though every different trait is massively important, it does tend to follow the same formula of "here is another skillset for this kind of information gathering, apply it directly to your own work but also branch out and look at the bigger picture to improve your overall wealth of knowledge".
I think this talk would really benefit from real world examples to really drive the point home. As I imagine a lot of people would think naively "well yeah duh of course we are all these" and real world examples could open their eyes to something they never thought about.
The whole UI mockup of tapping cancel with no feedback then suddenly calling your ex, forms mishandling name and gender fields were great. Would be good to see some in the other categories like legal, psychological etc.
I do think this was a great talk, on a really really important topic. Please carry on refining this talk and delivering it at other conferences as it is definitely something many people need to hear.
i've always personally struggled to wrap my head around plugin architecture.
I think this was a great introduction to how plugin architecture is/can be setup to be able to achieve what it achieves. But it does leave me with the same questions I struggle with of how to shift from traditional monolith application building to plugin based for a particular feature, without introducing too much mess for simple things (like rendering a table that plugins can add more info to etc).
For being an introduction to the concept, it was really good.
As an improvement, it would be really great to see more example use-cases but dont know if this can fit into a talk like this or if thats another talk entirely on a specific look into a particular pattern in plugin architecture.
I enjoyed it.
Lots of good and interesting things to think about.