PHPSW: Test or else... Legacy
9 Jan 2019 at Runway East: Bristol

Liked the diverse background bits and use of live coding to illustrate tricky concepts. As someone who already uses and appreciates the value of test, I am not sure this really got to the heart of the problems involved so was left wanting more technical depth.

Very enjoyable it may have been, but there was an incredible amount of value in the talk too - not least making legacy funny and interesting. Using a decent IDE definitely helps us hugely with legacy. The translation layer idea was an interesting idea. Putting a Symfony framework around the legacy app was a turning point for us, though, facilitating many of the other things talked about.
Look forward to checking out the blog.

Yes enjoyable talk by Rob. It sent me off down a rabbit hole learning about Mutation testing. Wish I had sat nearer the front, will do that next time perhaps. Thanks Rob!

A bunch of references [to British culture]... *waits for Mr Bean*
I love the start [this isn't an indictment on the rest].
"That was an analogy."
"Does anyone know who this company is?"
My kind of humour.
I found the layer of abstraction of your analogies still very relatable and accessible. Well done!
I was sitting next to someone nontechnical who might not know what "legacy", "var_dump or "refactoring" means, but I think your talk clarified those well (and one would expect a technical audience, right?)!
Great energy. Good use of facial expressions and body language.
Not many people have the balls to say "move slow", I think they're worried that it'll get pushback because startup culture is cool. I like this advice.
Thanks for covering what code climate and the other one are!
People are often reticent to make broken commits, especially if they are used to squashing or trending their commits... It's an important thing to say, I wonder if you convinced the doubters?
I think your description of driver/navigator wasn't clear enough, since people often make mistakes on this.
I would have mentioned that when you use best practice in greenfield projects you're reducing technical debt for when your project becomes legacy/older.
Is VSCode not a fully fledged IDE? (Never used it)
I would make "watch your users/learn your usecases" its own slide. So many people never use their application and don't know how they're used!
For the record, British audiences are like rows of mannequins, the only reason I know how to smile and whoop is because I'm half Mexican. So don't take it personally if people aren't jeering enough ;D Just have confidence and provide the expected noises yourself?
Interesting view on microservices!! I do agree that it's a bit overwhelming to do ALL the things at once.
I'm sorry this is so long (my feedback/commentary, not your talk).
Good mention of SOLID principles, I would recommend doing the whole acronym and telling people to read up on them if they don't know them, because there are some junior developers in the audience who might not be familiar with them.
I would throw in another easy analogy halfway through for a bit of a brain break, and a summary slide at the end!!

Thank you!!! Good topic, excellently delivered. Apart from missing out Mr Bean!
I liked your answer to the third question, it was very thoughtful.

Great talk. Learnt loads and have a good few takeaways to think about.

The humour was fantastically deployed too.

Great talk, learned a lot, and it was really entertaining. Only comment is that I've not heard of DDD as a new programmer, so that might be worth briefly defining.

What a great talk. The use of humour was well suited, and had some great ideas to share (will be implementing some of them with my team - mix of junior and senior developers).

I'd have like to have seen some code or real world examples to help explain some of the thoughts at the beginning...

Update: ...some code examples have appeared (which is mentioned in the blurb), and he's used Doctrine (I'm a fan ;) ), although as pointed out by Frederick, some small elements were missing from these examples

Great talk. Very funny and informative. Good concise code examples.

An engaging talk emphasising the importance of good test coverage.

I think the live demo worked well and was smooth enough to keep audience engagement.

Really great talk, good expansion of the subject, and made me laugh. Only suggestion would be to consider showing exception testing within the method as well as in the comment, for consistency with the rest of the tests, and because the content font colour want very readable.