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

Even though I'm a NoSQL skeptic, this gave me a solid overview and realistic use case for it. Examples were clear and everything was understandable without coddling the listener.

Very good placement of OSS in perspective and where it stands, and why forgetting the past battles may doom us to repeat them.

Really useful overview of AWS services though it did feel a little bit like an infomercial for AWS after awhile. I would have liked to see this talk expand to cover other cloud services and concepts before just always coming back to AWS and "click this button to use this turn-key solution".

Really really really cool. :) I came out of this already making notes for what I want to build.

Overall really good and uplifting, but lost me around the quote on exercise as a psyche drug which boiled over into thinking about that the whole rest of the speech especially when it got to breaking down tasks and executing on them "just do it harder!" ...

I'm sure that was entirely accidental and I get the intention behind it, and some of the stuff in here is useful even in my case, but it was a little bit of a downer to end the week on the reminder that... there are just some things I can't do when I'm not working with the same physical toolkit everyone else is. (Executive dysfunction, sucks.)

Very handy and confirmed a lot of what I had already gathered re: what I liked in API design. All in all great real world advice.

Really awesome dig into the concept and how it applies along with some pitfalls to watch for and where to go next. Great for someone starting from zero on websocket concepts

Solid presentation with damn good slides and handouts. This was a really really well taught course. My only concern is I would have liked to hear a little more about the ethical implications of some of the powerful tools this course was handing to students.

The example where the Chicago PD uses this tech to contact potential victims/criminals was honestly chilling. I'm worried that tool may have gotten someone hurt given how poorly some members of the Chicago PD handle community interactions. This course is definitely handing new students a loaded weapon in digital form. I want to make sure they know not to aim it at anything they don't want to see destroyed.

The idea of 'bad data in bad data out' is a good start, but digging a little more into the "no really, some of these uses could get people hurt so think before you do what your manager is asking you to do" might be good to emphasize how important it is to commit to making sure the data is clean of bias.

I know this is true for pretty much all code we do as programmers. But the AWS tools seem to make it really easy to put powerful pre-packaged kits in the hands of people without a lot of training or years of experience to develop that understanding or willingness to stand up to poorly thought out applications.

Overall really good with lots of great hands on examples integrated well into the training itself. The only improvement I would suggest is planning a little bit more for if someone runs into a hiccup while they're working on the demonstrations.

In my case I hit a snag in the second part where my database wouldn't update and fell back to taking physical notes instead of trying anything else until we hit a point where we switched to a different branch and I was able to start over. (A good way to let someone 'restart' if the tech went wrong.)

I didn't want to slow the class down or call attention to myself once I hit that hangup since I could take notes and get most of it that way. It turned out I needed a command that I'd typoed 5 slides before... which would be pretty easy to fix with one tweak to the demo materials:

* A text file for commands planned to be run in the demo.

That way copy'n'paste is an option to avoid typos or misreading the instructions, and if someone needs to go back to review what the commands are in case they missed one they have the record of what they should have typed and missed.