PHPBenelux Conference 2011
28 - 30 Jan 2011 at Hotel Ter Elst, Antwerp

Keith's talk was a true inspiration.
I have found a new earned respect for open source developers and maybe start triaging some projects myself.
The slides were plain horrible, but his presentation made everything ok.

In the end it went a bit to far into statistics for my taste. I'd rather have heard what he thought of the chosen approach in retrospect. Would he still hav chosen for triage instead of rebuilding. Would he have changed his approach to the recovery process? etc.

Thanks Mike for the good presentation!
Would be great if you could post the slides here as well.
Thanks in advance!

Nice talk. Great energy from Sander, what unfortunately meant that he sometimes talked a bit to fast.
Slides were sometimes hard to read, but the presentation was very nice.

Next time I'd actually like a demo of some more advanced implementations (multiple master db's of mysql with couchdb system combination)

Considering this was only his second talk, he did very well.

Martin gave a interesting presentation. Well done!
The only thing that distracted was his apparent nervousness. Don't be, you did good!
What I especially liked was the fact that, even though there were people in the audience with seemingly more knowledge about some area's, that he accepted it and incorporated it in his presentation.

The difference between Hudson and phpUnderControl can be left out for me in the future, since the differences shown in the presentation were merely aesthetical as far as I could see.

I thought this talk was awesome on so many different levels. Scott had great energy and passion. The content was mind blowingly interesting and he actually had realtime examples. I have nothing to add, except maybe that he shouldn't spend to much time debating with some people in the audience, but stick to the presentation, because the end went by a little to fast for my taste.

If I go to a talk about SCRUM in the wild, I presume SCRUM knowledge is mandatory.
As the description stated I like to see how Mike implemented it, what problems arose, how he overcame them, etc.
This however was a 40min rehash of what SCRUM actually was, and not very good at that if I may say so.
The interesting stuff was hurried in the end and went to fast for my taste.
I think there is a lot more potential in this talk if the SCRUM intro is kept to 10min tops and the experience part is given more time. Perhaps even an extra 10minutes for a Q&A with Mike.

I actually was a bit disappointed with content of the keynote.
Most of the slides were stating the obvious. Don't get me wrong, the 27 points were correct and good points, but if you didn't already know them you probably aren't a very god developer and you probably wouldn't attend this conference.
I'd rather see some more in depth how to's concerning some points.

The presenters however were nice and had good chemistry.

I liked the talk even without no experience with CouchDB. Only sometimes you where talking a bit to quick and then it was a bit difficult to follow, But overall great presentation

Great service! Good Food.

I understand that a sponsored keynote is more often than not a lose-lose situation. First of all, since it's more of a mandatory talk, most people who are there are not by free will, which is fine maybe, since MS has paid a quite large sum of money to let the phpbnl happen and in return we just listen for an hour about what they have to say. I get it, it's the way advertisement works and I completely agree with the system. But.. since you DON'T have a captive audience, and - let's face it - microsoft isn't really a "developers best-friend", you're gonna need to pull open ALL registers to create a really cool presentation to convince us moving to a platform as azure.

On the whole, even though great names like Dragonbe were behind it, the fact it was a 3-in-1 talk didn't really work for me. It looked too messy, with all three talks going into another direction, it's like reading the lord-of-the-rings but without the final book so you have no way on how all those story-lines come together. I would really consider making it a more fluent-> story the next time.

Maarten's talk was probably the most interesting since that was not so much about software, but more on the technology. My points go to his part of the talk.

Katrien was more appologying abouts microsoft's behaviour and after a while it was starting to get a bit annoying. We got it after the first few times :) Still, some great info about what microsoft is trying to do to better their life and I honestly believe that with all the development-guru's at redmond, something really great stuff for the php community can be created.

Mike's talk was a bit the odd-one-out. It wasn't clear (at all) what the whole purpose was of the deployment he did (and I don't consider myself a dumb guy). The fact that he deployed things on a normal and azure system, where the azure system took 10 times as much time (or even more, i forgot), is not really a great selling-point. Maybe you should focus more on the advantages of an azure cloud so in the end we can take the disadvantages for granted. For now, the only thing that sticked with me is that deployment sucks and is very slow. Which is probably not the story you would like to tell..


So all in all, much respect for all three speakers on daring to tackle such a sensitive subject in front of a big crowd, but still.. a lot of room for improvement.. but I assume there will be a service-pack released soon enough :)