PHPSW: Building quality code, April 2023
12 Apr 2023 at Runway East

The talk is great enough just by stating the fact and the importance of setting up a CI and trying not to be intimidated by it.
Making a start is the important and slowly building on top is what gives confidence and that's clearly communicated.

It's not a 5/5 for the following reasons that I think could help the audience better follow the presentation.

1. Slides could do with a bit of "prettyfying".
2. There are cases where there is a verbally explained situation but there's not enough visual presentation to accompany it. It would help the audience follow what you are trying to explain a bit more.


In terms of additional items, I would agree with Dan's comment to maybe dwelve a bit more on the matrix logic and how this can help developers avoid excessive pipelines and also increase confidence for upgrades, or for supporting multiple php or framework versions etc.

In overall, nice speech that should help a lot of people start doing CI.

# Structure

Near the end you started talking about how CI relieves you from "having to remember to do it". I'd probably emphasis how stressful it is trying to remember to do everything correctly, and how CI makes life way less stressful for devs. I'd probably also say that right at the start, while talking about how projects without tests are so annoying, so that there's a stronger emotional 'hook' for the audience during the more technical parts of the talk.

First 15 minutes (and maybe about 10 minutes towards the end), your speech patterns were very even, which made it easy to drift off. Maybe try to break those bits into clearer sections, where you can do some dramatic speech patterns, maybe like

"WHY!?
Why CI?
Because project where you have to remember to do everything correctly yourself is scary.

If you give me a list of checks I need to do before releasing any software.....I WILL BE SCARED. I am a relatively experienced dev and I would be stressed out and scared of making a mistake.....and inevitable I will make a mistake...blah blah blah".

Probably spend a bit more time on why build matrixes are awesome, particularly for people thinking about doing PHP upgrades, emphasizing how long it would take to do them by hand.


# nit picks.

English "not everyone is still using Composer" -> "some people still haven't found the joys of composer"

At some point you mentioned "CI detects mistakes you've made" should probably be "CI detects problems or things it doesn't understand" both for accuracy (as there can be a lot of false positives) and to avoid people think the computer is going to be criticising them

Great to see a full end to end discussion on pipeline setup.
Going from nothing is quite intimidating. This talk made it sound straight forward and in the realms of everyone