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

Ryan is a great and energetic presenter. The talk was well thought out and covered the subject matter quite well. Ryan's approach of reversing the talk and teaching us the "wrong way" of doing things to demonstrate the "right way" was innovative but sort of confused me as a listener. Perhaps with a few more tweaks Ryan might be able to more clearly distinguish between which techniques are right and which are wrong.

I love hearing Ed speak and I felt he did a good job explaining how to use Backbone.js. The pace was a little quick and the JS used was a little advanced. I think to get the most out of this talk you would have had to have already looked at a "getting started with Backbone.js tutorial". Fortunately I had already gone through such a tutorial a week or so previous. If not, you could probably do one after the fact, which might make Ed's approach make a little more clear.

I really like the LEGO theme and the Real-time demo showing the great power of Redis even on inexpensive, easy to obtain hardware.

Justin opened my eyes to Redis and was very clear on why and how to use it. He gave appropriate examples. I may have to go and have a look at Redis after seeing the power and hearing about the successes that have been achieved with it.

This talk definitely piqued my interest into Phar, but I did start to get a little confused and felt there could have been more examples on how to get started and seeing it in action.

Maybe some of the reason I didn't get as much out of it as I could was that I was feeling the effects of the previous night's partying, so it was a bit hard to concentrate.

This was a nice high level overview of Puppet and a few other related tools. Joshua did a nice job explaining why you would use Puppet and assuring us that it may seem intimidating to newcomers but is not that complicated and make the job of managing your infrastructure much easier and better.

This talk has inspired me to look more into Puppet and learn how to unleash some of it's awesome power.

Very nice overview of what kinds of things you should be aware of when devising your security strategy. Eli gave some good examples of different attack vectors, and how to defend against them.

It was a rock solid talk. Every point was well explained and it is clear that Paul is quite knowledgeable and does his homework.

On another note I think Paul has a great Radio voice and it reminds me of Alan Cross whom I greatly admire.

Anyone who listens to the /dev/hell podcast has surely heard the points covered in the Micro PHP Manifesto. It's definitely great to have some alternate viewpoints on how code should be structured and used. Ed has some great points that will appeal to a certain percentage of Developers who may not feel that full stack frameworks are the best way to solve their use cases. He also acknowledges that there are many Developers who prefer the structure that the full stack offers, "and that's ok".

It is great to hear Ed speak on any topic. I feel like he could read from a phone book and it would still be entertaining.

( funny Mythbusters comment from the previous poster. Now that I think of it he is right )

Great talk by Keith. He gave some excellent insight on how to go from idea to product the right way. It really gave me a different perspective and caused me to rethink some of my own tendencies.

This was a great talk that I thoroughly enjoyed. It was amazing how many people I hear referring back to Cal's talk throughout the conference. The term "we are not normal" was heard on numerous occasions and was worn as a badge of honour.