Vagrant for PHP Developers

To be honest, I did not really like this talk.
Why? I had no Vagrant experience before this, I even had not heard about this product until today, I had to google it (yay free wifi!).
So that is my background.

I went to the talk with the expectation that I would get to explained what Vagrant is and what it solves, but I did not get any of those answers.

Very quickly the talk went to talk about the "provisioners", of which I did not even understand WHY you needed those. Are you required to pick one, or are their optional? What in fact does Vagrant do, and what does their Provisioner do?

Then I got a bunch of statistics about the different provisioners, I assume the speaker was very proud of these numbers because she did the research herself on it, for which big thumbs up.
However, because I do not know those tools yet, and I was not even convinced to use them, I just did not see the relevance of them.
I hope it is not to just run "apt-get update" every time, because that is what I picked up from it.

I would have prefered more emphasis on the basic Vagrant myself, maybe show an actual implementation of it. Also explain why it is better than just a plain VMware tool.
I can create a snapshot of a VMware installation, and share that between my co-workers, what is the benefit of Vagrant here?

I think if you rebranded the talk more clearly that is not an introduction to Vagrant, but rather an "state of the vagrant-market", it would have been better. It did not give enough information for a beginner.

Anyway, if the speaker still wants to convince me of Vagrant, feel free to do that tomorrow. ;)

While I agree with Koen that the talk could have focused more on explaining the basics of Vagrant I definitely think this was a good talk. Well explained and even though you had a slight accent I could clearly understand everything you said.

Also I've noticed some talks today were pretty rushed. This definitely wasn't, it was well paced so it was easy to keep up.

As I said, the basics were more or less covered. Perhaps the next time you could highlight more features and advantages that Vagrant brings. Also, the overview of the survey results was a nice thing to see, mostly because I followed the survey online but you might want to swap that out next time so you can spend more time on Vagrant itself (perhaps a live demo)?

So there's definitely no need to rate this as a 1 star review. It was a good talk that covered the basics and gave a nice overview of the provisioners and their pro's and cons. Thank you for a great talk! :)

Good basic overview but I also miss the live demo / hands on part ;)

I liked the talk. It was a little more relaxed and fun but I did have the same feeling as Koen. I was confused on what Vagrant had to offer me and how it's linked to Ansible, Puppet, ... But I'm definitely going to check it out.

I knew a little about vagrant already (use it at work but do not write vagrant files, etc.) and for my level of knowledge the talk was perfect. It explained what vagrant was doing, the tools it was using to do it, and some examples of how.

Perhaps because Vagrant is so popular she may not have thought about it from a complete beginners point-of-view (I have the same problem sometimes!). I didnt see any issues however.

A fully live demo isnt really possible with vagrant (since you'd have to download image files etc. and it takes a while to boot VMs/install things). Maybe some screen shots to run through a full "vagrant up"/halt/destory/etc. cycle *at the begining* of the talk mightve made the rest of it a bit more grounded for beginners.

I agree with Michael. A bunch of colleagues and myself just started to explore Vagrant a bit, so we have some basic knowledge of its capabilities and potential. So for me personally the zooming in on provisioners was exactly what I was looking for (Shame I missed the Ansible talk the next day though). Live demo would've been nice but, in my opinion, isn't required. Overall great talk, keep it up!

Overall a good and enjoyable talk, but maybe some more focus on the practical benefits of Vagrant as well as more demo code to show an actual setup might be a welcome addition for the newbies this talk is intended for.

This was a really nice talk and you present in such a charming way: pleasy keep that up. I can imagine that if one never worked with vagrant one would miss out on its benefits, but luckily I'm one of those who had some introduction before and who is working with it on a daily basis now. I do not yet setup my own boxes and provisioning, so I also would have liked a demo. You made me go to the ansible talk the next day, kudos for that.

One minor thing, please don't take offense, but ask someone who's English how to pronounce 'ruby'.

One thing no one mentioned so far: I really liked the graphics in your slides. You put so much effort in creating attractive graphics with colors even matching the phpbenelux colors or specific provisioner vendors logos. It made me think you are actually a designer and are programming and doing research by accident.

Really enjoyed the talk, I think it was well organized and presented. I already use vagrant, but more as a consumer, so hearing about the different provisioners was exactly what i hoped to get of this talk.
Indeed, had i known nothing of Vagrant, i would have missed the motivation point at the beginning, the "why should i care?" question. Then again, somebody could have asked that question at the end, there was enough time for it.

I was in a similar situation as Koen. Totally new to it, I heard the guys at work mention it for an upcoming project so I decided this is the right talk for me.

As a complete newbie, it went too technical, too early on. I was still trying to understand the concept/visualise how it would work for me as a developer. I also find it difficult to choose a provisioner because I simply haven't got much experience to make an educated pick. I'll base my pick on your research stats :)

I will however use your blog posts for when I setup/configure Vagrant.

A++ for your slides! They were a great joy!
Would recommend a bit more exercise in pronunciation :)

Great talk, since there was some time over I would use that time to add some information to newcomers to vagrant and virtual machines, other than that GREAT AND OMG THE SLIDES ARE SO AWESOME!!! I would recommend practising the talk before giving it to someone who can correct certain pronunciations, even though most of them were fine <3