php|tek '12
22 - 25 May 2012 at Sheraton Gateway Suites O’Hare

This may be his first conference presentation, but Neal is clearly comfortable in front of an audience. He took a variety of questions from the audience, as they arose, and this did not get him off-track during his talk. He knew the subject of his talk thoroughly, but was comfortable asking the audience members what they were doing in terms of performance monitoring, also. He could make this a workshop with no trouble. Not sure if Graphite and Carbon is the right tool for me, but there are definitely some things I learned from the talk.

Great presentation and coverage of a wide array of QA topics. The extra/extended talk on unit testing was awesome.

Cal was terrific and inspiring as always. Don't miss an opportunity to hear him speak on *any* topic.

Ed's an entertaining speaker with a funny, casual style. He recapped his manifesto and then fleshed out some of the ideas behind it. The minimalist slides kept with the overall theme of simplicity. I thought his strongest argument came at the end (the future of server-side PHP will be as the glue between client-side apps and backend data stores, so full stack frameworks will be less relevant).

Great job handling a controversial topic, and keeping it fun.

This was a very good topic and Laura did a good job talking about the different types of tests.

One issue I had with the talk was it seemed like we were just looking at code and Laura just went down the code, line by line. Not sure that was really needed as we all know how to read the code. Maybe next time simply putting the code out on github so we can look at it ourselves and just a general overview of the code would have worked out better, plus it would have given us more time to really explain when to mock and when integrate.

Ed did a great job of engaging the audience (Except for Chris who was doing email). As always, Ed presented his thoughts in a somewhat contraversial and thought provoking manner which helped people to understand where he was coming from. It was challenging to answer questions which he felt clearly reflected a personal bias, but Ed was always clear to specify that when it was relevant. He did a much better job than me of not snickering when somebody asked how they could help expand his microphp framework :)

Informative and entertaining. His ideas were explained well and included many background anecdotes to help the audience come around to his point of view if they were not already there.

Cal, the effervescent morning guy, brings it home in a rousing presentation focusing on the PHP community. Thanks Cal!

I enjoyed the simple nature of simple db. Eli did a great job of explaining the system, use cases, pros and cons. His talk inspired people to ask many questions, which makes for a better talk in my opinion.

I like Eli's care free nature and ability to talk in front of people easily. Something I strive for in myself.

Caught Jakes presetnation in the morning sessions. Nice expaination of the topic. Might look for higher contrast and larger examples on some of the clever backgound patterns so they will show better on the projecters most conferences have.