PHP North West 2017
29 Sep - 1 Oct 2017 at Manchester Conference Centre

It was often entertaining and packed with lots of info that, depending on your role, would be really useful.

However, turning up late, blaming it on a heavy night drinking, then plugging your company sadly does not give a good impression for the company.

Also, the talk description makes it clear that there was to be some infrastructure-based content and some developer-based content; in practice, it was almost all infrastructure content, and the stuff that affects me as a dev started with less than ten minutes to go to the end of the talk. I would have rather seen a 50-50 split, but in practice I didn't actually get much that will affect my dev role.

Good intro to the topic, which I knew nothing about prior to the session. Left feeling like I understood the basics of the topic with a couple of tools to try out, so could certainly progress this now myself. A stronger example would have been useful, but maybe not possible within the time constraints.

Delivered just what the description said it would - very well pitched intro talk to chatbots which left us in little doubt what we could do next to get up and running ourselves. Excited to give it a try!

Very entertaining, lots of real world examples of problems, and lots of tools / processes highlighted to look over / think about how to implement.

I enjoyed the talk, although from the description I was expecting to see more developer tools that I could use locally, whereas this was more server-based tools. Still, learnt enough about quite a range of tools to be able to think about that aspect of performance testing.

Very well pitched talk for Terraform newcomers - showed off the simplicity of the product without overwhelming, and highlighting some of the issues to look out for.

Exciting dive into PHP history and new development to improve PHP performance, also phan is now on my 'to try' list

There were a couple of challenges with the talk:
1. The description in the programme was really ambiguous - I was not sure what to expect when I arrived in the session (and it turned out that I'd misunderstood the purpose of the talk).
2. Throughout the talk, I was unsure what the actual solution was that was being proposed. I imagine to those that have worked with it, it will have seemed clear, but for me, I kept hearing about 'content' being moved into 'silos' but I was never clear what those 'silos' were. Some clear examples of this with some implementation details would have made it a very different talk.

It was literally right at the end in the questions when I understood what it was about - I could then see potential in the theory, so now have food for thought.

I felt this could have been more useful with some extra preparation:
- emailing out the requirements that need downloading
- doing a repo which had the actual code for the examples, with different branches for different stages (the repo supplied just had snippets in, so when individuals made mistakes, we lost a lot of time trying to fix people's code that could have been really quick if it was just a case of going to branch x in the example repo)

As a result, I felt like I was sat waiting or just trying stuff myself rather than being led at a faster pace through the subject matter.

Apart from that, it was an enjoyable talk with a very likeable teacher.

Really well prepped talk - the repo with the branches containing the examples was excellent, and kept us all on the same page.