PHPSW: PHP 8, February 2021
10 Feb 2021 at Online

As always, awesome talk: informative, well paced, entertaining, well explained!
Thank you so much Larry.

Two suggestions for improvements.

First, as people are looking at the presentation on a screen, there's very little need for a border compared to when they are watching the slides on a projector. Most of the code screens would be easier to read if the code was taking up as much space as possible, rather than having huge borders. I tend to not watch videos sitting down...I'll be standing up and doing exercise, and watching the talk on a TV screen so the bigger the font the better.

Second thing, I think breaking the talk up into different sections, and having tiny breaks between them would give the audience time to process the info (aka I found it difficult to listen to the full list at full speed for the whole time.)

e.g. First, give a list of things you're going to cover, like: 1) new functions 2) Type system changes 3) BC breaks.

Then for each of the sections be really explicit and say "okay, now I'm going to talk about new functions" at the start of that bit, and then at the end of that bit say "okay, that was the new functions in PHP 8", and then take a pause of a few seconds. Having a clear break from talking allows people to 'reset their brain', and makes it easier to follow the talk. Currently each bit flows into each other, which is tiring. Just a few seconds reset makes it easier to avoid fatigue.

Thanks for that - as you said at the top, it was basically an illustrated changelog... so to present that in such an engaging way was no minor feat. I felt the features listed were explained clearly and the examples supported that very well. The one exception was the Attributes stuff, which in part may have been due to me getting The Fear about having to now deal with poor implementations of that in future... but to me the example for Attributes was a little conceptual/abstract. Other than that, however, Larry covered the topic in suitable depth and clarity to immediately make me want to seek out his supporting links. Top stuff.

Superb overview and great use cases and illustrations. I share the enthusiasm for constructor promotion as my favourite new feature. Loved the clean code examples with the new possibilities. Will get the book.

Really enjoyed it. Hard to say something meaningful and original in 7 minutes, but you did both. Tests as documenting thought is a really helpful context and it will stay with me. Likewise programming intent as proto assertion. Well done!

Great talk! Informative, well paced, entertaining, well polished!

A few features I hadn't heard about, so I'm glad I saw this talk.

My excitement for PHP8 has been increased, so I think you have achieved your objective!

Amazing Talk, Great introduction to what's new in PHP 8.

Great delivery, deep understanding.

Doctrine Annotations but in core (Meta).. this was a little difficult to understand, maybe a better every day use would help.. maybe just me not understanding it.

Thank you

I think Naomi spoke very well and clearly: I enjoyed the thought process thread going through the talk, but felt uncertain about what the conclusion was. I *think* that it was that all devs design their tests first by virtue of thinking about what it was they wanted to achieve before writing the code to do it, and the step required to move to TDD isn't a huge mindset shift, but simply to express that "test" (i.e. statement of expected outcome) in code, before then moving on to code the code. Thankyou for the talk!

Great little thought experiment! TDD is not a mindset change, but a change of habits. And the answer to which comes first, was not as straight forward as one might think.

Short and sweet, entertaining and thought provoking! Well done!

Interesting way of looking at what comes first. Would love to start thinking TDD first rather than.. "I just need to ship this code".