Designing Beautiful Software

This was a great talk - presentation skills and slide content. Always enjoyable to see Matthew speak!

Great presentation! It should be required for all (serious) PHP developers

Great and inspiring talk. Very good example of how the code gets refactored.

Good presentation showing how design is important. I especially liked the focus on maintainability.

Excellent discussion of how and why to make ugly code beautiful.

Very enjoyable walkthrough of how problems become more complex, and how the code has to be better designed to accommodate it.

Wonderful talk. I appreciate the way Matthew walked throug the evolution of a bit of code, and pointed out how requirements drive improvements. Everyone could stand to improve the reusability and flexibilty of the code they work with daily.

Your example on refactoring the simple act of sending mail to an extensible and testable implementation is spot on. Sending mail is probably something every PHP dev has done in their career. And if not, it's still easily accessible.

The talk structure is well done, but needs a call to action at the end. You could benefit your listeners by suggesting some resources on how they can start to recognize these structures in their own code and start applying these principles. Recommend some books and concepts people can check out to learn more on their own.

This is a talk I would love to see at every conference, and we need more like this!

Excellent, so much I'm even willing to forgive you for wearing open-toed shoes. Honestly, nice to see the thought process behind the evolution of good coding practices and some common sense approaches. So, where's the slides?

Excellent talk. Good subject and pace worked well for the duration. Can't believe you were so kind to me after all the kibitzing I did from the front row :)

Nothing I didn't already know from using oo php for years now, but I would love to force some of my cohorts from work to see this talk. Must-see for php (or oo-php) noobs.

Great talk, and great content. I like how he started with a very simple two-line solution to a requirements, and evolved the same feature as requirements grew - something that happens to all of us. Since MWOP is ZF lead, I can see a lot of what he talked about within ZF. Slides could have used a bit more design pop - would have shot this presentation thru the roof.

Great talk. I really liked how he stepped through the thought process, which I think is the hardest thing for developers to understand. But when they do, it is like a light bulb just turning on and it all makes sense. I also appreciated how the speaker acknowledged the fact that different methods have pros and cons, and in their own way, sometimes the less elegant code had it's place.

Now if my code was always beautiful.