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

This was an alright talk -- maybe not the best choice for an opening keynote. I think I would have preferred something a bit more forward looking than a talk about how great the community was in the past. As a first-time attendee, I sort of zoned out after the first few slides of "who's who".

Great overview of web security threats and prevention. Chris is a great presenter and easy to understand. The one improvement I would suggest would be to have a vagrant box available ahead of time, instead of cloning a repository and trying to get it to work on different systems that did not already have dependencies like SQLite installed. I think we used up all of our time to the first break just to get people up and running with the local PHP server method. I would attend another training or seminar session led by Chris.

Great talk, of course. This talk was particularly useful (given that it's all about ME) to senior developers. This was good career advice at that level.

This was a good lighthearted keynote about community, and that message was clear. I've been writing code as long as most, but PHP community is new to me. Thus a lot of the photos and insider references were lost on me. I'd love to have been able to more completely follow along.

This talk was even more useful than I expected. Marcus reminded us of where IPv6 fits in to the OSI stack, and touched a breadth of subjects (with details) on getting servers talking to each other. He based his talk on his own experiences with migrating to IPv6. It's always pleasant to hear from a subject matter expert.

Katie McLaughlin's comments say it best. I've been buried before trying to understand the Liskov Substitution Principle, given that it's the "L" in the SOLID principles that Michael Feathers and Uncle Bob want us to follow. Explanations generally refer to the concept of an Abstract Data Type without ever helping me understand what they're talking about. Thanks to Chris, I now "get" Abstract Data Type and its meaning to my life.

With the possible exception of Samantha's keynote on the same topic (history of computing), this was the most fascinating talk of the week. I'm sad that Chris only got a short-talk time slot for this one. Rather than merely talk about what mathematicians did in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, Chris explored the theory with PHP. Epic.

This was useful to me. I needed to know the how, when, why, of the more advanced Redis usage. Matthew's talk showed how things fit together. I asked Matthew about pub/sub before the talk started, and he said it was outside the talk, so I was not disappointed. I'm fine with "out of scope" topics! After the talk, he referred me to a subject matter expert at the vendor table. Can't say fairer than that!

This talk was a voice of experience with concrete examples and sensible use cases. Everything a talk should be. I now know of new tools to explore. Talks like this are the reason to come to PHP Tek.

I didn't know the story of the rise and fall of Safe Harbour, etc., only that US perspective is different. This was quite useful to me.