PHPNW 2013
4 - 6 Oct 2013 at Manchester Conference Centre

Split screen worked better than I thought it might, the talk flowed well between the two speakers. The content was good and presented well, a good way to kick things off.

Really enjoyable talk and a great way to end the conference.

Cheers for the feedback guys; much appreciated. I'll try and answer some of the questions that have come up here.

1s varnish cache: Would only save 1499 requests if they were all identical (they aren't). Most pages are personalised to some degree and some things arent cacheable at all (account queries, betslip, login, API requests etc) so the effectiveness of the cache would be extremely limited.

Readability/Maintainability: On the contrary! We've found the stripped down, simple approach has made everything much more readable, maintainable, flexible and quicker to write.

Other frameworks: For sure there _may_ be a framework out there that would be a good fit in terms of raw performance but we only assessed a limited number before giving up. Also how a framework scales is a bit of an unknown and not something that is widely talked about. We probably wouldn't find out that a framework scales badly until it's too late. We weren't willing to gamble the future of our products on this.

Mongo is a cache: Depends on your definition. It is not a traditional time-based cache as the data in it is always bang up to date. I consider it as an optimisation to our order of execution!

$$$: Can't go into specifics but the project has realised a full return on investment 12 months after starting (not finishing!) the project

Stats: A combination of JMeter, log files, Splunk and Graphite

HTH
Dan

I agree with James Shaw's comments. It was certainly slick and well rehearsed. However, the almost scripted nature detracted from the message which was trying to be one of enthusiasm.

Particularly in the first part it felt like a segment in which a local TV presenter hands over to the weather forecaster with false bonhomie.

I'm sure these speakers do have a deep knowledge for the subject but it didn't come across. Maybe it could be improved by more of the real world stories and less tired truisms.

Food was great! And this venue for the social was BRILLIANT. Everyone could do what they felt like, in a quiete area or a more busy area which means perfect perfect perfect! Thanks I had an amazing time :)

Great story and very nice slides! Very engaging speaker who showed that she knew what she was talking about :)

Hackathon was great, guitar hero could get a bit loud for us who tried getting some coding done and burgers sucked. But it was still much better than last year with a working wifi, YAY! :D

An excellent keynote and a perfect way to end the conference. Many of the ideas were simple, but they were adapted and aimed at a technical audience, whilst being accessible enough for everyone. Very well written with the right balance between humour and serious content. The material was delivered very naturally and confidently by an engaging speaker who held the audience's attention throughout. Brilliant.

It was interesting to see the approaches that had been taken to rethink the architecture with a completely performance-focused mindset. Obviously a very specific case study, but there were things that could be taken from this and applied to other similarly performance-driven applications. The speaker seemed to grow into the talk after a slightly disjointed introduction.

As someone who's briefly read about SOLID, but not really gone into any depth I found this was pitched at just the right level. There was reinforcement of bits I knew and new ideas to add to the mix. Very thought-provoking. And the speaker was excellent, clearly very knowledgeable and equally engaging.