PHPSW: Time for the Future, June 2018
13 Jun 2018 at Desk Lodge

Apologies in advance if this comment makes no sense, I had to nip to the loo during the talk so could have missed it if you're already doing this.

I think you might be able to make the maths a bit easier to understand by showing the graph where the learning is seeking the minimum value and explain how the learning tries to get to the lowest point, before saying "in mathematics this is done by looking at the derivative and trying to find where it is zero".

Although everyone will have done derivatives at school, showing the curve and saying we're trying to find the lowest point gives a much easier handle for people to grok, before throwing the big words around.

Doug wrote: "I think you showed the cat example too early, it shows a complex network with lots of features before we’ve seen a simple one." - Second. Also it would be good to hold off showing any diagrams with hidden layers until a clear description of what hidden layers are, and why/when they are useful.

I think the slides could do with quite a bit of work to improve the legibility of them. For quite a few of the slides the code was just way too small to read even when squinting.

For the slides that had images on them, those images should be 100% of the screen width and height for people to have chance to see the details on them.

This was such a fun and informative talk, thank you Derick!

The quiz at the start was brilliant and was a great way to engage the audience.

And then it was great to get a refresher on DateTime, all the quirks and weirdnesses and to learn about DateTimeImmutable!

Looking forward to reading the updated book, good luck with it!

As others said, sometimes you explained things ahead of the explanation on the slides which might have made those moments feel a bit "rushed through", but as you had a limited amount of time that was understandable (and, as a co-organiser, thank you for sticking to the schedule and not overrunning :D).

Overall a great and well prepared talk!

It was a very well-rehearsed talk and you were calm and engaging throughout! You picked a complex topic so well done for managing to explain it clearly and at a good pace in the very limited time you had. The maths went a little over my head so I agree with the other comments that maybe it would be better to leave some of it out and add links for people to read through and digest in their own time (purely because of the time constraints).

I really liked the way you highlighted the code to focus on as you were explaining it in your code snippets. Made it easy to follow along.

There were elements of fun which I liked, you had memes and made some funny comments throughout which gave what could have been a very academic and "dry" presentation a nice and approachable feel.

As Lucia mentioned already, it was great to see you making sure everyone is following along and has a chance to ask for clarifications before moving on to the next part.

And as Dave said, you should totally submit this to conferences :)

Well done and thank you, I enjoyed listening to your talk!

Thanks Vítor, that was a really good introduction on how Neural Networks can work. The use of PHP, while probably not ideal in creating a real system, does help with the understanding of the process (as I'm much more familiar in this language, so I can then focus on the ideas, rather than the syntax).

As to an improvement... I'm not sure what to suggest, in a way I wonder if there is a better example than modelling XOR, as while it keeps the number of inputs small (2), it's a very rigid structure which is hard to see as learning, other than looking at the final outputs, which shows that the neural network is confident of the result, but isn't overly sure (i.e. 0 vs 0.003).

Thanks again for the talk Derick, this morning I've been replacing my instances of DateTime with DateTimeImmutable, which is easier to understand... where $dt->modify() returns a new object, without effecting the current one (much better than having to clone, then modify).

Really enjoyable talk.

You made what could have been a dry topic very entertaining. Loved the quiz at the start.

My only minor suggestion for improvement is I thought some of the slide transitions could have been done as you were explaining the steps rather than after.

I thought this was a fantastic talk and I learnt lots about time and timezones.

Really enjoyed the quiz, even if I never put my hand up as I was sure they were all trick questions!

I'd have liked to have seen a bit more about the gotchas of storing and retrieving Dates, as that's the bit I've made the biggest mess of historically.

Looking forward to the updated book's release on DateTimeImmutable("+1 year").

A great talk.

The topic was interesting. The slides were superb, some of the best I've seen. You spoke really well, it was clear and the right pace through out.

To improve... I wonder if you could still tell the same story but remove some of the maths. The maths could still exist, but maybe be in a blog post or markdown doc in the git repo which is referenced in your talk. It was pretty complicated so to really grasp it probably requires time sitting down reading.

Also maybe provide further reading slide at the end.

My final suggestion would be to submit this to a conference!

A great first full length talk.

Really comprehensive talk about Dates/DateTimes in PHP, with a lot of caveats and edge cases. Very knowledge speaker and the quiz was a great way to kickoff this talk. Was a pleasure and an honour to be sharing the stage tonight with Derick.