ScotlandPHP 2016
29 Oct 2016 at Dynamic Earth

A very honest talk about all the pitfalls of running Event Sourcing & CQRS in production. This is a must watch if you're dealing with these type of systems. You could really tell that everything Michiel was speaking about came from experience.

Interesting topic and a live demo! Very good delivery & pace, engaging speaker. Definitely one of the best talks at ScotlandPHP!

It was an interesting talk and it seems you have a lot of practical knowledge. However, the talk probably had too much content which made it feel a little rushed, and the structure/flow could have been a little bit better. I understand the nerves, and with a little bit more practice this could be a good talk!

Very good & recognizable talk on what it takes to implement (true) CD, and the various pitfalls one encounters. Well paced, with a lot of good information and takeaways.

Jessica's talk was a nice way to end the day. A good talk, shining a light on the self-importance of our communities. I would say that Jessica was a little too far on the side of not taking a side though. I'm by no means suggesting this light was wrong, but perhaps coming out and saying "I prefer x over y" would've made it more interesting. And it was interesting. In the tech industry it's extremely common place to see fan boys, though I would challenge the idea that more familiarity takes someone from "I don't really care" to "mine is better than yours! die! die! die!". I'd argue that it's a curve; when you don't have a horse in the race, you don't really care, then when you pick a horse, you care DEEPLY, then when you ride that horse and see that it is just a horse and some horses can run faster on a track, whilst others are faster on the steeple chase. In my experience, it's the core teams who are the most pragmatic and accepting and those who have scratched the surface who are deeply nuts.

As Jessica said, she's given the talk in other settings and it applies just as much. For a tech conference it had to be a bookend talk, providing a moment of reflection rather than actionable content.

I enjoyed Dave's talk, but I felt it lacked something. The delivery was good and the content useful, but I got the impression that he'd delivered the same talk a dozen or more times. Don't take that as criticism, it was good. I suppose it felt more like a tech demo from a supplier than a talk about the how and why of the topic. I'd prefer a real-world scenario rather than "it's here, here's the functions, what you do with it is your business". Again, not a criticism, but it would've taken it from a good talk to a great talk. One thing you can say is that Dave is supremely knowledgable and confidently fielded all questions, hardly missing a beat.

As one of the 2 people in the room who held their hands up as the fabled "Full Stack Devs", I was impressed by the premise that UX != UI and it applies just as much to APIs and internal tools as it does to client-facing sites. Eryn drove home the fact that you should think about the user before you think about the database tables. I really enjoyed the presentation style and you'd find it hard to argue with the content. Good food for thought and solid ideas I can share with the team.

I thoroughly enjoyed Rick's talk. It was entertaining and insightful. I can immediately see the utility of the patterns discussed. It's refreshing seeing a speaker live code; yes mistakes were made, but he recovered quickly and going from empty file to working class in minutes is more convincing than reviewing prewritten code. It would've been interesting to live-debug/trace a request to see how it all knits together.

Good talk on some ideas and pitfalls in moving towards a continuous deployment release process from a scheduled release process. I'm not sure I agree with all of the content of the talk, but there was plenty of food for thought and being challenged in your ideas and beliefs is a very good thing.

Very good talk on some testing tools and practices. I personally would've enjoyed an exploration of how PHPSpec fits in somewhere between PHPUnit and Behat. My personal view is that it's more approachable for those new to testing and really promotes BDD and TDD.