php|tek 2009
19 - 23 May 2009
at Chicago, IL
Talk comments
A lot of information seemed old-hat because I've used frameworks fairly extensively. The 'good stuff' came when addressing general namespacing and 5.3 issues.
Great presentation skills - good pacing - nice looking slides.
Great information, good presentation.
I've used pre-built front-controller modules before and mod_rewrite has always been a bit of mystery, but the presentation helped reveal a bit more about what is going on there.
It's too bad that the presentation was rushed at the end due to time - I can't remember if that was a pacing issue or because the presentation started late... but I felt the pacing was about right.
A good presentation - although I've been over the YSlow concepts/suggestions before and your presentation covered a lot of what Yahoo offers as performance suggestions.
It's probably not a bad idea to direct the audience to check out the YSlow plugin for Firefox, and the materials distributed by Yahoo.
There was that awkward question/answer moment during the presentation due to the fact that it was not clearly communicated that a browser does not saturate a given computer's total bandwidth. Perhaps more information could be given in regards to actual browser functionality, request pipe-lining, and actual bandwidth usage.
Great presentation - both content and style!
There's a lot of ground to cover, from fundamentals, implementation, performance tweaking, opcodecache, user cache - you need two presentations.
My only regret is that you couldn't possibly cover all the information in one ... and I regret not hearing everything else you could have talked about.
Hearing even more about real-world implementations (like Facebook) would be great.
You needed at least 2 sessions to cover all that information! Perhaps you could have an A + B presentation and divide up materials that way.
Also, although it's impossible to have absolute numbers to offer as 'good' performance values - there most certainly are rules-of-thumb, ratios and percentages that can be generally suggested as performance red-flags that require investigation. Including those in the presentation would help, albeit with a big "YMMV" slapped on them!
My preference is for less wordy slides - but you already acknowledged that you needed them for the presentation, which is fair.
For a first-time presentation I thought you did admirably :)
Personally, I was looking for more specific examples.
It would probably require an entire "refactoring" of the presentation but I was thinking it would be good to see you take a real life example of XML document processing using XMLReader/XMLWriter and make that the central thread to the whole presentation.
You began talking about how XMLReader can help speed up reading pieces of the EBay WSDL - and was hoping that you were going to continue down the path of using an example like that through the rest of the presentation. More like: "Got problem 'A'? XMLReader can solve it like this: ... " or "Got problem 'B'? XMLWriter can solve it like this: ... ". Granted, that's my particular preference for a topic such as the one you presented on.
As noted above, the pacing was awkward - it dwelled on seemingly unimportant things for too long which caused me to lose focus at times.
I suppose it's personal preference, but I felt there was a bit of information overload in the presentation without enough specific implementation examples. Also, some slides are a bit 'wordy' and could be thinned down a bit to the bare essentials that you could speak to (ie. 13,22,29,45,47).
Sides 32-41 made my brain go to mush as I was trying to process/remember it all :) Mind you, going through the slides after-the-fact has been very useful - so, it's not all bad.
Your energy during the presentation was great - you kept it lively even if my brain felt mushy at the time :)
A memorable presentation that gave me things to take home with me.
Only recommendation would be to possibly have a summary side (or two) that quickly summarizes the concepts explained and the particular practices that the developer community should think about implementing.
I enjoyed the presentation, although I've heard a lot of the information before. The best bits of the presentation were when you went 'off-script' to answer questions or inject real-life scenarios/issues encountered.
I found the slides a bit 'wordy' - but you readily acknowledged that at the time.
I would love to see a companion presentation about process implementation and implementation issue resolution (ie. How to get from process A to B - and what pitfalls to avoid.)
Very good information - this was something new for me, and something that will help me improve things day to day. Why didn't I read up on all this earlier?!
Good presentation, good materials.