PHPBenelux meetup Valkenswaard March 2014
11 Mar 2014
at White New Media Architects
Talk comments
I really liked the talk and could easily follow even though I have never worked with Solr before.
A quick introduction to Solr could be handy in the beginning like Jeroen said.
But as soon as you started I could follow thanks to every example.
It has been said before but the font could indeed be a bit larger.
And when you switch from example to a view of the GUI it was really hard on the eyes ( black to white), at least on the front row.
Don't forget a 'Group By' example!
Overall a very good talk and it got me really interested in Solr!
Really good talk on Solr. I've recently done a project with Solr, and now already I know a couple of things I can do better next time. Thanks for all the insight!
Having worked on parts of the Autotrack project myself, I cannot really judge how the presentation would be without this background info.
I think the project has some really interesting and challenging solution, so is a good candidate for a case study. A few tips:
- in some cases you refer to the autotrack website, in other cases to (simplified) raw query result data. I think the raw data can in some cases be helpful to show the limitations you ran into, but it might be a good idea to start each subject with a quick demo / screenshot of the functionality in the autotrack website. That helps people to connect a certain technical solution to the result for the end user, where the data alone might not always be enough for people new to the subject. That also fits with a case study, I think.
- you briefly explain there are multiple indexing strategies and that you use two, a full reindex nightly and incremental updates during the day. But you don't explain why.
This was eventually covered in an answer to a question at the end of the presentation, but it might be better to briefly touch this in your presentation since you mention two strategies.
- the tagging / excluding is a hard subject to explain, in my experience even to people with some basic Solr experience. I think it would help to spend a bit more time on explaining exactly what functionality you need, using the Autotrack website as a reference, before going into the technical details.
Also you could try to emphasize that you are basically 'picking and choosing' filter combinations for each facet, where the resultset itself always has all filters applied. I think once you get the concept clear, the technical explanation makes more sense. And even if the audience would still not be able to follow all the implementation details, they would at least have a good impression of what functionality you managed to create, which might be more important than the technical details (as you said, you could talk about that subject alone for hours to get it fully clear)
Based on the title and description I was expecting some more in-depth stuff, hard lessons learned in practice. While there are some examples like that, there's also a lot of 'simple' do's and dont's for people starting with SF2.
As mentioned in the other comments, it's hard to determine what the target audience is.
However, as a developer with basic SF2 experience (no expert) I managed to pick up a few useful tips so that's good.
Thanks Jeroen for the talk.
It is very interesting to hear a core developer of a successful site like AutoTrack give some insight about how you pulled it off.
Maybe it would be nice to start with a little introduction about what Solr is, and which problem it solves.
And I don't really get your title, it's not a headline that sells the talk.
The practical examples were really nice. I think you need to find a way to increase the font size if the PHP code, this will not work in a bigger room. The font of the resulting queries is about the right size I think.
I would really be interested in a Workshop on setting up Solr and running the first queries, for example during the Dutch PHP Conference. You can take some shortcuts by supplying a simple schema and a data JSON file.
The talk got me interested to give Symfony2 a try for the next web application I have io build from scratch (which does not happen very often). Till now I used Zend Framework.
Indeed it was kind of a bunch of tips and tricks, but quite a number of them are useful. Maybe it would help if you sort them based on required skill level. The dependency injection was quite a heavy subject to start with if you never did a Symfony2 application. Start with the tips about finding documentation, then installing using Composer, then heavier subjects an do's and dont's.
Thanks for the talk, it was really worth the time.
A nice talk, and even though the subject (and the project) are known, I still found a few new things.
I think that you should relax when trying to speak. I know your english is good, so no need to emphasize your sentences.
I liked the move from simple elements to the more complex elements, but the same as Stefans talk, I cannot figure out what the target audience is. If it's people who have no idea what Solr is, or are just into this talk for the use-case, this talk will be very hard to follow.
For people with (some) solr knowledge, but have no idea about the project, you might try and elaborate your cases a bit more detailed (like the pivotting), and the reasoning why you went for the given solution.
But overall a nice presentation.
A below average rating from me for this talk, but nothing that cannot be fixed.
For a personal taste, I didn't like all the army references. I understand the idea, as it's from the trenches. But for me personally it distracted me from the presentation.
- First, I think that the idea of the talk is ok, but i couldn't figure out for what kind of audience this talk is intended. For beginners, i think this talk is a bit too much, diving into some of the depth/trenches, which may be a bit too hard to grasp for beginners. If the talk is for more advanced users, I think most of the points are pretty much clear for most. So I guess the talk is intended for intermediate Symfony2 developers. However, not sure.
- I think the concepts of "best practices" is very good, but would have liked more real tips. Most of the things I heard are things that lot of developers already know, and I missed a lot of the time why you should do things that way, and what the pros and cons are. (for instance: use the form-builder, even for simple forms, because it takes care of csrf, and validation etc, is a great tip so people get the advantage).
- The story itself was a bit incohesive, but that's pretty common when giving presentations for the first time.
I absolutely sure that the next time that Stefan does this presentation, it will be at least a 4 rating (from me).
Ok, let me start off with saying that I just started learning SF2. So I'm looking at this talk as a complete beginner with this framework.
As a beginner I could definitely follow every point you mentioned, not that I know how I would do everything you mentioned it was a good reminder for me to look into each and everyone of those points.
Like Jeroen said I would start with the more basic things like the documentation and then go to the harder subjects.
As for the slides, I would change the blur container to a black version and give it a little less opaque, then with the text white I think you can solve 2 problems. The first is that some text was pretty unreadable. The second was like Joshua said, the slides background can be distracting.
But overal I liked the talk and learned some more!