TEK·X
18 - 21 May 2010 at Sheraton Gateway Suites O'Hare Hotel, Rosemont, IL

I am very interested by statistics and submit links to dzone quite often, so I was very interested in this analysis of the patterns of topics they are observing. DZone has a wider technical community than the sites used just for PHP information so I thought this was an appropriate talk, perhaps not the world's most dynamic speaker but an interesting guy and a nice gentle start to the day.

Always one of the most entertaining speakers to listen to, Elizabeth does an awesome job keeping the audience entertained while beating them over the head with what can be the most confusing and complicated subjects.

While the talk was excellent and very deserving of it's 5-rating, it really felt like it might have been better suited as a tutorial session or two separate 1 hour sessions. The basics of using the languages' built in streams was jumped through quickly, and near the end felt slightly rushed as building your own stream from scratch was covered. Given the time frame, the subject matter was covered perfectly, but I left wanting even more.

The only real complaint is that at the end, it would have been nice to see the entire completed custom stream in one full class writeup, and followed with an example of it in use. In the end it was hard to really visualize how everything learned would fit together.

Great talk to see although these aren't technologies that am currently using. I got a good feel for how I would fit these into my existing MVC application and will be referring to the slides when I get there.

This session was a bit disappointing, I was hoping for more emphasis on clean and simple technologies, but mostly saw stuff that as a disabled user I'll never be able to interact with. Good session but I'd have liked to have seen a session with a wider appeal - this is open source after all, we're usually inclusive

Excellent and informative talk on agile development methods and I really appreciate that it was more informal than most talks at the conference. What I think hurt the talk more than anything was the audience, rather than the speaker or the slides. The talk was obviously planned to take cues from agile methods, but at times it felt like audience participation was lacking to hold up that aspect of the talk. It felt like some people there were more interested in being handed the "right" way to implement and use Agile methodologies, when there truly is no 100% "right" way.

Jason brought a lot of first hand experience to the table, both from the perspective of a long time agile manager, and the perspective of moving from waterfall to agile methods for the first time. There were great discussions as to what does and does not work, and where problems can arrise. I came away being much more comfortable with the methods my workplace has put into use and better understanding how agile helps a small development group.

Finally XDebug has been explained to me in a way I can grasp and understand! Being able to see remote debugging working live and in real-time was a huge help and something I have never been quite able to figure out on my own. It would have been nice to see it integrating into IDEs other than Komodo, but given the time allowed it was well paced and covered a great amount of useful information.

This talk suffers from bad timing, but other than that was a good overview on what is new and shiney for web developers to keep an eye on. After Josh Holmes's amazing talk on simplicity, this felt like a rather odd juxtaposition from the concept of "do we really need these new shiney toys, when old ways are simpler and may in fact still be better" as described by Josh.

Some of the trends mentioned felt like they were out of place at a conference specializing and focusing on PHP and related technologies. There seemed to be an emphasis on Ruby in several of his slides, which felt especially out of place. All in all, the talk just felt too broad and didn't bring much new or relevant to the table. It may have worked better as a lower priority talk, but as a day 2 keynote it was lacking.

I enjoyed the talk and appreciated the beginner level, since I'm new to it. We're in the middle of planning a rollout of replication so this was perfect for me. Be warned, I will likely take you up on your offer to send questions via email! Thanks again.

The only complaint I have about this talk is the timing. It was an amazing beginners guide to setting up a new version control system and build a code and release management plan, but it followed two much more comprehensive and in-depth talks. Timing-wise, this would have been a much better talk if it were placed before Lorna's and Travis's talks which would have provided a much more natural progression for someone as new to version control as I am.

As for the specifics of the talk, this is exactly what I've been needing in regards to planning code management. Other talks have either too briefly touched on these subjects, or completely skipped them, in favor of more in-depth discussion of other source control features. It was nice to have a talk strictly on version control and code release to help someone go from absolute zero.

The one thing I think the talk was missing, was real world examples moving into a source control system. Eli did an excellent job covering the uses, benefits and downfalls of different trunk/branching techniques, which helped a lot, but if you already have a huge pile of source code and need to transition to one of those it is much harder to choose than when starting from scratch with a new and empty code base.

A great talk that made me rethink my plans for source control. I never would have thought using bridges so that git and svn, and any other source control, could work so well together. The talk was definitely geared more towards those experienced with SVN and Git than those looking for a fresh start from nothing, but it still was very easy to follow for such a newbie. I appreciate how unbiased the talk was, and how everything was presented from as neutral of a view as possible. It was refreshing to be able to see each Source Control solution in such a light, and made great cases for each solution in different coding environments.