PHPNW12
5 - 7 Oct 2012 at Mecure Manchester Piccadilly

Interesting content, & well presented.

Well presented talk, but felt that it was a little rushed to get everything in. Not sure if there was anything that could have been done about that though.

For a while now I've wanted to get involved in some open source projects, but not quite known were to start.
A great overview of how to get started for newbies such as myself, but also really informative with regards to the benefits of getting involved for those who might have been a bit sceptical.

Extremely well presented & informative talk, from which I gained a great deal of info about various tools available for tested, as well as sparking ideas for perhaps setting up a peer-code-review group?

Useful overview of PHPUnit, although I felt it was a little high level for me, but perhaps because my knowledge of PHPUnit is still reasonably limited.

Really useful overview of the stuff we need to know. Well presented too.

Great entertaining talk... A great reminder to focus on the finer points.

It's unfortunate that you commented anonymously as I'd love to chat and see what you would like to hear about RE: scalability issues.

The ORM statement *was* over dramatic. I thought long and hard about including it, but it's such a polarising statement (and in my experience, it's true!) that I decided to keep it in. Either it made people think about how they're using them, or it validated those that have been burned in a similar way.

I fully agree that ORM's are good in regards to not having to write your own mapping and data access layers, but that's not what the talk was about. When it comes to scaling your solution they're generally your biggest issue (or so I've found). For high volume systems, the performance/developer time tradeoff isn't worth it. I used an ORM for rapid development of our application, but it was the first thing that we pulled out when trying to increase performance.

If you've developed a system that uses an ORM successfully to process millions of requests an hour (without caching) I'd love to hear about it, as I'm open to changing my mind about them. For now though, I stand by my statement that they're evil.

It started so well - it was well paced and the movement through the topics was easy to follow. But then the energy dropped off and the talk slowed down (trying to fill the hour?) and by the end of the talk all my initial 'yay for the community' enthusiasm had died away. Double the content or half the length of the time slot to keep the energy level up and this would be a better talk.

A superb talk on a oft-forgotten subject. Ben was a clear and confident speaker who took great risk to show multiple real demos that helped to give the talk a practical feel (even though the demos were basic and could easily have been shown as slides of results). The second half of the talk which moved on to business event logging and aggregation was slightly rushed but was still pretty clear and I came away with lots of ideas and enthusiasm for the subject - given we are talking about logging here I'm very impressed!