ScotlandPHP 2017
4 Nov 2017 at Edinburgh International Conference Center

The talk was good - Renato definitely knows his subject matter - and the Starwars photos were a nice touch :-) Delivery/presentation was a little too fast though.

Entertaining speaker and interesting topic. I'm not sure if it was part of the circumstances (being jetlagged and having arrived at last minute), but I wish the introduction was a bit shorter as the talk had to be interrupted when things were most interesting for me.

I understand why people are put off by the swearing, but to me it felt like part of the personal style and I did not take offence in it, neither did it distract me from the talk's message.

Being a personal story I think it's fair to not mention alternatives to the management styles and conclusions promoted in the talk. Even though I don't think they always apply/work in every team. I didn't perceive the message as hard left leaning/"SJW" rant. Meri drew from her own experience to promote ways how to recognise and work against inherent biases without blaming/shaming anyone. Her talk relied on highlighting how a company atmosphere/culture shapes our productivity and the advice she gave on how to create a welcoming atmosphere were people like to work and are able to contribute resonated with me.

These aspirational/motivational talks and personal stories are part of the conference culture I like best as they give a glance at something outside the pure technical aspects of the job - which I can also learn from books & playing around with tools or by listening to the recordings - and provide food for thought (and discussion) instead.

Enjoyable talk and likeable speaker.

I think the initial section on introducing standalone components in a legacy code base was good, but switching from slides to editor was taking me out a bit. I think moving this into the slide would work better for me, especially as the code snippets were rather small. Maybe using a short gif/video works better than manually switching branches and quickly clicking through code. I'm not fully convinced that retrofitting Eloquent to a legacy project is the best idea/example, but as I have never done it I can't fairly judge that.

I liked the concept of hybrid applications for refactoring and I think the talk should focus more on that as it seemed to be the part that most people asked about. I left with some questions on specifics such as sharing session data, how to move (legacy) code into the new project. I think explaining this approach in more detail, maybe with examples taken from existing projects, could be a full talk in itself I would be interested in seeing.

The final part seemed a bit tacked on to me, especially since Craig seemed to discourage from it as well and there was pretty much no detail or code samples for it. I would like that time to go into one of the first 2 sections of the talk.

I enjoyed the talk, but as someone who is not intensively working with MySQL on a day to day basis, especially not doing administrative tasks, I would have liked some of the new features to be put in a context or explained in a little more detail.

It seemed like Dave presumed everyone was already familiar with 5.7 either from using it or from listening to his other talk(s). I think it's reasonable to at least quickly recap major changes such as JSON-support instead for those who are not.

I liked the idea of leaving time for discussion/questions, but judging by how it was picked up the time could have been spent working on some of the points above instead.

Great introduction into container orchestration using Kubernetes. It contained the perfect mix of terminology and foundational logic with practical samples showing those concepts in action.

I particularly liked that Terrence initially gauged the audiences level/interest to shift focus on practical examples rather than discussing basics.

I would really like a talk building on this one showing some of more advanced features only briefly mentioned, such as logging & monitoring or maybe running hybrid setups.

Meri,

You've made my Amazon wishlist a lot more expensive now! :D As a demi-manager I think it really helped to understand what we need to be providing our teams in order for each person to be at their best.

I feel your points on inclusion (and exclusion) are right on point and showed how your experience has helped you make places more awesome for everybody.

Hope to hear you talk again soon!

Adam provided some really good points on building clean code. This talk definitely left me with a few books to read!

Quite a bit of the talk centered over some aspects that you'd hope teams and developers already implement but would be great for more junior developers to take on. Despite this there was still plenty that I can take on and apply with my team.

Thank you so much!

Interesting talk, interesting project, nice presentation. I did find a number of the examples quite similar and would have appreciated maybe fewer of them and an example of something a bit more complex.

Entertaining speaker but didn't really get onto any of the interesting bits until the time was almost up.