PHPSW: Code Quality, March 2018
14 Mar 2018
at Brightpearl
Talk comments
Great talk. Lots of interesting points about who we don't think about cost very well (e.g. £100 expense claim vs 8 people in a 1 hour meeting).
To improve: I'd work on a stronger ending. Really push through the take-aways that we can apply to the next day in work.
I think a structural improvement could be made to the talk by breaking some of it up into 'chunks' that covered a concept, with little breaks between those chunks. Particularly for the last quarter of the talk, where it felt quite like the speaker was just going through a big list of stuff, rather than telling a coherent story.
The readability of the code slides could be improved by really optimising the layout for slides e.g. Code snippets don't need declare(strict_types=1). Gray comments on gray background are never going to work. If possible losing the titles and footer for slides that have code on them would make more space avaiable.
I'd change slide 91 to 98 to all be on 1 slide (possibly with each item appearing separately with fragments). This allows people to see the whole list at once when you get to the end, which makes it easier to re-read or take photo.
A lot of the text could be a lot bigger. e.g. slide 12 which has "Products - Long-live projects. Open source software." There is plenty of space for both lines to be 3 times the size, which would make it easy to read at the back.
A good amount of snark, with lots of interesting examples. I liked how you brought it round to advice on how to evaluate technology.
Good talk, as others have said this is quite conceptual, drawing lots of parallels between non-tech concepts. Kept me engaged with participation and a bit of cynicism heh :) ?
A talk that everyone could appreciate irrespective of their language and level of coding skillz. Some great food for thought..
Good talk with good audience engagement and examples. Speaker was easy to follow and the time seemed to fly by.
Great talk, more philosophy less technicalities for better value :)
good talk, but I feel it lacked real world example and included a lot of very abstract references/examples
Great talk, with real insights about why people use PHP.
A great talk about all areas of code quality. Lots of useful bits.
To improve: I'd like to see references to stats that give the business case for doing things like testing / code review that you can take to non developers / managers. As developers we shouldn't spend days improving performance of code without first getting a baseline to use as a reference to see if we've actually improved things. It is a reasonable question for a manager to ask what the cost benefit analysis of activities like code review and testing are.