PHPNW12
5 - 7 Oct 2012
at Mecure Manchester Piccadilly
Talk comments
I am a bit biased but I think NoSQL solutions don't get as much attention yet as deserved. This was a really good introduction, although some subjects could do with a better clarification (CAP, and MapReduce).
When I saw this talk before (in Dutch) it flowed a lot better. However, for a first time at a conference in English, Jeroen did a good job. As a few hints, try to keep the flow while speaking - at times it was quite 'staccato'/choppy. Also, I suggest you don't drop the f-bomb :-)
Ian's presentation provoked quite a lot of thought for me about how we typically deal with large volumes of data. The analogy of a firehose actually describes it very well. Defining real-time as the time for data to propagate through a system was interesting and was backed up with some really good examples.
The only downside for me was the sheer amount of information being presented. Whilst it was well structured and well presented there was very little time to actually ponder many of the concepts being discussed.
It is good to see that phpDocumentor is still alive, or rather, alive again. I think the live coding/documenting first, and then showing how the tool worked was a good idea. However, if you do live coding, you really need to make sure to have your screen/IDE setup to have a larger font, and a lot more contrasting. I often even go as far as turning off colours altogether.
I liked the content with many good points. It started off great and energetic but the energy went and the talk lost page very quickly. That's a shame as I think the talk has a lot of potential to be even better than it was now. For a closing keynote, you really need to be able to continue the energy all the way to the end.
A greatly entertaining presentation that provided a good high(ish) level of information regarding the checks that need to be carried out prior to performing a code review (PHPCS, PDepend, PHPCPD etc).
One thing I think would have been good to hear would have been to define some of the parameters around who fulfils what role and why. We all know there are developers with more domain knowledge than us but what makes them right in the first place, especially when it comes to carrying out code reviews?
As mentioned above I felt the presentation was pretty good but it could have used some further information about actually scaling applications to meet the demand of users. The coverage around making applications module and redundant was a good reminder for those who don't already do this though :)
For me this served as reinforcement that the SLP does indeed provide some seriously cool tools when dealing with data structures. Most of these I had read up on when SPL was announced but completely forgot about in that time.
The only downside though was the resolution / quality of the screen which meant parts of the presentation where not readable but Patrick coped with this well and covered off the core elements nicely.
A great presentation covering the different ways that PHP has evolved and how developers should be implementing date / time within our systems. I will definitely be revisiting my own systems to make use of these improvements.
It's interesting to see that people are still (looking at) writing new languages. It is an enormous effort which was luckily quite understood. The presentation provided good information, even though there wasn't a lot of information about Safire yet - calling it the "new PHP" perhaps goes a bit too far though :-)
Great start to a Sunday morning conference, especially when introducing cats :)
I will be very interested to see how some of the technologies and techniques described will impact other projects on the net. Designing responsive systems really does seem to be the future of large-scale application development but could possibly cause smaller projects to become complicated and over-engineered.