php[tek] 2015
18 - 22 May 2015 at Sheraton Gateway Suites O’Hare

@Anonymous from June 10 @ 12:44.

I appreciate your feedback. This was the first time I had done this tutorial so I'm grateful for feedback on what I could do better.

I'm terribly sorry you had a bad experience. The combination of hotel wifi being uncharacteristically slow and me not having people add the vagrant box to their machine before the tutorial (which was the only thing missing from the prerequisites) caused a lot of people to be behind in getting the Homestead environment up and running. This caused us to spend an hour on Homestead as we waited for downloads. I was glad we got to spend a lot of time on it because I felt like many people didn't have a good grasp on Vagrant or Virtual machines. I'm sorry if this wasn't valuable to you.

We also had a number of people using Windows, which we recommended in the prerequisites to come with OS X or Linux machines. I wasn't aware of anyone on OS X that wasn't able to get homestead working.

I believe I have a solution to the Windows issue for any next opportunities that would involve giving those user a pre-configured virtual machine to that had everything already installed and configured. That way the tutorial wouldn't be held up by waiting on people trying to figure out Windows.

I'd love to offer some one on one time to help you get everything going and give you a tour of the framework. You can find a few ways to contact me below, give me a shout and we'll figure out a time.

Email: first @ first + last .me (Google Hangouts as well)
Skype: Svpernova09
Freenode: JoePFerguson

Registered almost as an afterthought, and ended up being 80% of the value of the training and tutorial days.
Good overview of some tools and usage. Only change I'd make would be to demonstrate more of the tools/techniques in action (particularly IDE integration and showing unit test coverage tool), and have a handout about various tools with a brief description of each.

Complete waste of time and extremely frustrating.
There was a prerequisite list, and the session was listed as "beginner". In reality, the prereq list was so incomplete that almost 2 of the 3 hours of the session were completely wasted with attendees trying to get set up with the actual prereqs (with several mac and windows users ultimately having to give up), and then NONE of that was actually used for the content in the last hour.
I'm sure Joe knows his stuff rather well, but there was no value in attending this class. In fact, if I didn't know better, attending this class would have given me the impression that Laravel is far to complex and fragile to be a viable framework.

Overall the session was useful. However the exercises took a good chunk of time and were effectively a huge waste of time. Too much effort was required to get to the point of the exercises, and there was no "here's the answer" files to be had afterward. This could have been accomplished by distributing security-less files to start the exercises with, along with solutions to be studied later.
The exercise time would have been much better spent learning new security material, as it's a rather large subject.

I tend to comment on talks way after I heard them to reflect, often I forgot a lot of what I heard but yours is just like a keynote should be, inspiring, really really really inspiring, and almost brought tears to my eyes at some point, this is what a lot of people don't realise what's going on behind the scenes.

Also: Your presenting style is amazing, and your slides are beautiful.

Keep up the good work in everything you do, a well deserved 5, there's nothing I would change, thanks for a keynote I'll remember :)

Yitz has a habit of leaving people wanting more, and this workshop was no exception. As we worked through Conway's Game of Life in three iterations, he would offer glimmers of insight to better solutions, but wouldn't give anything away. It was much an exercise in abstract thought as it was writing code, which was a nice change of pace from writing code for clients.

Especially interesting to me, as I was in the midst of writing an offline app using PouchDB at the time of the conference. Great information presented well!

Great high-level look at the concepts many self-taught devs (myself included) may have missed out on before. This talk provides a great starting point for those who want to learn more, yet provides just enough for others who only want/need a basic understanding of things like stacks, heaps, and queues.

I feel like I would have gotten more out of this talk had it been presented after the "Practical Computer Science Concepts Simplified" talk from Joshua Silver, but Matthew is a sharp developer and fantastic speaker. The SPL has been a hot topic in the conference circuit, and Matthew is one of the most knowledgeable speakers I've seen.

Good description of the *process* of debugging, but like other attendees I would have liked to see more focus on the tools used.