php[tek] 2016
23 - 27 May 2016 at Sheraton Westport Chalet

One big thing out of the gate - this was labeled as a 3 hour tutorial, yet only lasted a bit over an hour. From the content being presented, this wasn't just a rush or lack of audience participation. I feel like this was an hour talk. There just didn't feel like enough content nor things to do to ever come near filling the entire slot.

I also feel like the talk was misrepresented in it's content. This was, at it's heart, a design pattern talk. From that perspective it did it's job well - it introduced the most common design patterns and how they work. The talk did not do what was on the tin, which was teach how to use them to reduce technical debt, nor how using them future-proofs your code.

My suggestion would be to just make this a 1 hour design pattern talk, and it will be a much better representation of the content.

A fine topic to wrap up the conference. Cal's preparation and dynamism was most evident.

Although a solid, technical presentation on a topic in dire need of more documentation, this did come across as an answer in search of a question. James touched on this in the latter half of the presentation when discussing appropriate use cases for an extension (e.g. interfacing with a C library). To that end, I felt like the audience would have been better served with an example somewhere between the "Hello World"-esque calculator and culminating OpenGL example, despite the obvious "wow" effect of the OpenGL demo.

I can see this being a presentation that users would want to refer to after the fact for reference. Given the amount of code in the OpenGL example, much of it unrelated to HHVM's extension API, a more basic library would be easier to digest.

I don't recall if James mentioned basing the examples on a particular HHVM version, but given that its APIs are still evolving, it would be beneficial to annotate the slides with the version employed and/or notes about such caveats, especially if folks may end using this as reference material.

Samantha masterfully wove personal anecdotes, history lessons, and philosophical points into an outstanding presentation. Between her choice of topic and high-octane delivery, this was keynote material through and through.

Solid talk. Lots of great tools and techniques covered. The casino analogy worked well.

Adam covered various approaches for upgrading extensions to PHP 7 and gave a thorough explanation of how best to provide PHP 5.x and 7 compatibility in the same project. His experience as maintainer of both the Radius and New Relic extensions was evident in how he handled audience questions and dove into details as they came up. Fundamentals for extension development were introduced succinctly and the material also had solid depth so that even those familiar with extension development were given some new ideas.

Well composed presentation with solid tips about wrangling up some code that may or may not be under control. Especially since you said it was your first giving that talk. It could be worth including some discussion about leveraging the VCS history (if possible) to get some understanding of the code base.

Covered the core concepts of Redis fine. The book example somehow didn't connect to me. Would be interesting to hear comparison to other caching backends (memcached, APC, etc...) One thing to keep in mind is that there are probably many who have used Redis but don't even really know that much about it. With Magento it can be used as caching backend and all you need to do is update some configuration to point it that way (I think you can do the same in Laravel). Then you only think about it when it falls down (hits maxmemory or something like that).

This was a thought-provoking session that covered the social-to-technical gamut of evaluating open-source contributions. Katie kept the material flowing with positive energy and left the audience with a handful of practical take-aways. The presentation was not tied to any particular language or tribe, so it'd fit right in at a non-PHP or polyglot conference.

I had no idea that UK companies couldn't host in the US. I thought that there was a bunch of good information. Hard for me to put my finger on exactly what, but felt like it could be polished a bit more. Maybe a theme would help?