PHP for grown-ups

Good pacing, good subject, good speakervoice. The content itself was a little low level though since I think most people who attend meetups know the SOLID principles pretty well. It is a good talk for a beginner group, but in my opinion, the audience here could have handled more indept use cases (maybe GoF Design Patterns?).

A small tip I can give you about your presentation. It's usually better to look at the audience, instead of the screen/slides. Your slides should support your 'story', so try to steer away from falling into the trap of reading out your slides. You seem to have a firm grasp on all the SOLID principles and how they apply, so instead I would suggest just going over them ,what they mean, why they are useful etc etc.

All in all I enjoyed it and I think you could be a great speaker.

I've given you some feedback in person already but I'll repeat it here: Having seen this talk before (when it ran a little long) I know that you can tell the story right. All the good poiints are in there, but I'm missing a central line this time. There were a lot of pieces of wisdom in this talk, but there was nothing to connect all of it together. As I mentioned last night: perhaps try writing a blogpost of the information and take the structure of that into your talk. That is a method that has helped me structure my talks a lot.

That is actually a lot of text for the "negative" part, and that is not my purpose. The information you were giving is still good information, and while you were clearly nervous I think you did offer a lot of wisdom. You know what you are talking about, that is clear.

The talk gives an overview of PHP good practises. Good to see emphasis on things like exploiting your IDE and the importance of naming things properly. More developers should take note!

Thanks a lot for the positive feedback and the great tips on improving the talk and my speaking skills! I agree that there is room for improvement, especially on Jeroen's comment that I should look at the audience instead of the slides is spot on. But considering the fact that this was my second time doing it I was pretty happy.

I have to say that putting together and delivering a coherent story is a lot harder than I expected. But your feedback and the great conversations on the night itself definitely makes me want to do it again :-) So thanks for that, and until next time!