Ski PHP Conference 2014
17 - 18 Jan 2014 at Salt Lake Community College

@adamculp - We definitely did need more signs. We had to make some last minute room changes, otherwise the conference would have been a lot more consolidated. I believe the sponsored events being farther away had to do with GitHub wanting to attract attendees of ng-conf as well.

@omnicolor - See my comments to Adam for your first two points, and we'll try to make it better next year. The wifi was probably the problem I was most annoyed by. You should have seen the username they wanted to use at first, I had to convince them to use "skiphp"!

Thanks for the positive feedback as well, we'll try to make Ski PHP 2015 even better!

Well done conference. A few suggestions for next year:
* Consolidated location. There was quite a bit of confusion about getting to the rooms in the other building. Part of it was that the signs letting people know how to get there weren't up for the first talk. Part of it is that it's just annoying to have multiple buildings. Obviously a very minor gripe and after you learn where the other talks are you no longer need the signs.
* Closer after events. Attendee participation in the after events was very limited. While obviously some were not interested in going to a bar since they don't drink, I felt like the skating might have drawn more attendees had it been closer.
* Wifi password was annoying. Having a strong password and then writing it on every white board doesn't make much sense. Hopefully the college's IT department could set it to something easy to remember and type, like 'skiphp'.
* The talk lineup could have been more diverse. It seemed to have an overabundance of security talks. Obviously an important topic, but there's only so much that can be said about PHP security.
* Introducing the speakers before their talks was very awkward. Especially since most of the speakers have an about me slide that they had to then skip over.

Things that were awesome:
* Session line up: four tracks of pure awesomeness.
* The food was both tasty and didn't give us food poisoning.
* The venue was pretty well suited to the size of the conference.
* Speakers were well taken care of, from picking up at the airport to extra-curricular activity transportation.

Overall, great conference and I hope I can attend next year!

Great job on your first year. Nicely done, and very enjoyable. Food, speaker room, and location were pretty nice. Internet was not a total fail. And once I figured out where the rooms were located it was alright, though if they had been closer together it would have been easier. (Signs were OK, but a layout map would have helped.) One important part missing was a lounge area for the "hallway" track. Needed some chairs, and possibly some tables for people roaming the halls during talks to use for this. Also would have been nice if sponsors had coordinated more with the conference for the offsite events. Transportation and attendance for extra functions were a bit of a "miss".

Thank you for the comments. The internet access was the most frustrating pat for us as well, and will definitely factor into our decision for next year's venue. We did have the rooms somewhat track-based initially, but then changed them to put the most popular talks in the larger auditorium. Maybe next year I'll have them color-coded on the schedule by track, so that even if they're in different rooms, it's easy to follow a track.

This is the first PHP or professional conference that I have ever been able to go to so I don't have a lot to compare to but I thought this was a great conference. I was able to learn a lot of things that I can do to improve my coding style and procedure. I also really liked the caliber of presenters that we had. You could tell that most of them really knew what they were talking about and had lots of experience to back themselves up. I look forward to attending this again next year.
Probably the most frustrating part of the whole thing for me was the internet access. Especially in the main lecture hall I would lose connection and have to re-enter my password if I just moved from one side of the room to the other and much of the time I couldn't even get my computer to connect correctly without turning off my wireless and turning it back on again.
I know that this would take more organization but it might be nice to have the presentations organized in certain tracks. Maybe base them on skill level so that the beginning developers would see stuff that wasn't over their head and the more advanced could get information that they want. Another option might be to base them on topic. That was just an idea I had that might make it easier to decide what classes to take.

I am planning to see if we can have the videos available for attendees very soon, and just have the public ones trickled out. I have not discussed this with our video people yet, which is why I did not announce that. I don't foresee it being a problem, but I didn't want to promise something I couldn't deliver.

Overall, a great conference. I look forward to the next one.

I was extremely disappointed when Steve announced that only one session video per week would be posted. I was counting on them all being posted in a timely manner so that I could watch the videos for the sessions that I wanted to attend but couldn't due to conflicts with other sessions. The height of my enthusiasm for conference talks is at a peak during and immediately after the conference, but with this schedule, I will have long since lost that enthusiasm by the time the sessions I'm interested in are posted. I will likely have either forgotten about the sessions I wanted to see, or have been forced to figure things out on my own. I sincerely hope that you will reconsider this decision and post all of the videos at once, and soon.