php[tek] 2017
22 - 26 May 2017 at Sheraton Atlanta Airport

One of the best sessions I've ever attended! Explanations for all pieces were explained for beginners and refreshed for those who were already aware. I doubt that anyone left not learning something which can be difficult to do in a session that runs the gamut of expertise in a subject.

Joe's talk was useful to me personally. His work team is the same size as the developer team that I'm on, though his company is the opposite end of the size spectrum. Joe explained how they've worked through their process and deployment, which are things we're taking a fresh look at, at work. Waterfalls are beautiful, just not at work.

This talk was understated in its significance, in my view. "The public good" needs to become more of a consideration in our PHP world, lest it become forced on us by engineering disasters. Samantha did a great job of conveying the need for this message.

This talk was useful to me in seeing where hack fits into the PHP ecosystem. We had good concrete examples showing the concepts. This might have been less clear for people who aren't familiar with "struct" concepts for other languages, but it was easy enough to see from the examples.

This is why we have php[tek]. Other than reading @nikic, it's been a very long time since I've seen an Abstract Syntax Tree discussed. I'm glad that Derick continues to pass on this sort of information. This talk was clear (but advanced subject matter) and flowed well.

Lorna's talk was solid. We had a quick intro to what NoSQL is (and is not), followed later by actual demos and examples. She used a sample dataset which we can download. What she did NOT say, but simply emitted, was as valuable. I'll be checking on iTerm2 and the other command-line goodies she called out. I've been looking at NoSQL for a year or two. I came to the talk hoping to find out where CouchDB fits in the ecosystem, and I did. Take aways: (1) Designed for reliability on unreliable commodity hardware; (2) sync-later when connectivity becomes available; (3) on the other end of the sizing continuum, large-scale is coming together.

This is the sort of talk whose value will prove out over time. This was the right kickoff to php[tek]. Danese spoke as if her whole audience are personally contributors to major OSS projects, which is not the case. However, her message to each of us as PHP community professionals was spot on.

Emily's workshop met her stated objectives, which is always a good thing. I didn't really expect the hands-on part to be of much value to me personally, but it was. I've not dealt with user stories in several years. It's a different (to me) way of looking at things; as such, the content was of value to me. Emily's elaborating of her own experience working in a University environment showed how her group applied these concepts, including the difficulties.

Fascinating talk. Didn't know this stuff existed. As I'm now writing APIs that will exchange data between some of my own applications, I will definitely incorporate this into the process.