PHPNW 2013
4 - 6 Oct 2013 at Manchester Conference Centre

Very good speaker who kept my attention for the whole talk!

The speaker was wearing a hat indoors which I found confusing and bewildering.

Speed of talking and, more importantly, the speed of the slides (especially slides that had a LOT of code on them) disappearing was TOO FAST!

The unclear title didn't help, but the breakneck speed of this advanced material made this my least favourite talk of the conference.

Slightly too much content for 50 minutes - the slides were flying by! Xdebug and xhProf seem to be essentially the same (?) so why not strip one out?

It was very noticeable that the talk became a bit like a New Relic advert during the second half. That's a paid-for "corporatey" thing which seemed to not match the PHPNW audience.

Also, I would have enjoyed some more real world examples and anecdotes and case studies etc.

Volker was hilarious and has a great deadpan comedy style.

This topic interests me anyway and so I'm an easy sell, but Volker really gave a great introduction and overview to the whole topic here.

Practical and informative.

I've seen one of Rob's talks before at PHPNW12, and quite like his confident, let's-get-to-the-bottom-of-this style.

This talk was well titled and very focused.

Rob really knows his stuff and explains it clearly and honestly.

Speaking speed a little fast, and possibly slightly too much content for a 50 minute talk, but this was quite useful and I can see that the speaker knows A LOT about the subject.

How I would improve this talk would be to slow down the delivery and perhaps chop some of it out. For example, cover just one of Puppet or Chef.

Very interesting. I had lots of those "Yes, I can see why doing that is a really bad idea, but I remember seeing it in our code" moments. Looking forward to seeing the slides so I can refresh my memory on how to put right all our wrongs.

Brilliant. A well presented talk with an excellent amount of content. Also with a live demo that was executed without a hitch. You always know a good technical talk as you walk away thinking 'I really must give this a go' and this was most definitely the case.

With all these kind of talks, where you are at in your career progression will dictate what you will get from the talk. In this case unless you where really junior level the talk was a bit obvious and not rewarding. The dual room was cool and link ups very nicely done. I did find Lorna to be talking to us like 5 year olds at times, may be its just the way she talks to audiences and is her style but personally it was very annoying. Oh and any one that can solve problems on a treadmill has not turned it on yet! As soon as it starts rolling the last thing your thinking about is code (usually its not dying).

Mental health though I thought is a great point, should have gone into it more as its becoming a real issue in the IT industry especially for freelancers who get isolated and lonely so may be for a future presentation some more info into mental health and some links to places to get help would be good. To many people suffer and don't speak out!

Really good information and presented really well, but I think there was a little too much to cover in the time allowed so bits of it felt a bit rushed. Other than that it was a great talk!