True North PHP 2012
2 - 3 Nov 2012 at Microsoft HQ

I concur with Stefan. It definitely stood out from other topics, but it applied itself well to the audience. This is a good model for the skepticism talk to follow.

Great case of slides being a mere accent to a talk. The entire keynote flowed like a conversation, and Chris didn't drop a beat. I had no idea what to expect based on the title, but there was a solid amount of practical application and relevant stories throughout the talk.

Some of the memes were a bit graphic, but there was real material buried within this presentation (even if the overweight guy on slide #19 ate the surrounding slides). This would definitely need to be sanitized a bit for a real slot, but it was quite an enjoyable way to wrap up the unconference.

I'm not sure if this was Phil's first speaking role, but he did a great job regardless.

Fun stuff, indeed. This should have been a real session! Paul is a delightful speaker and the story/material was quite captivating.

I think the areas of improvement have already been discussed -- the essay and wide, off-screen projection was not a suitable format. Beyond that, I found the lead-in from introducing the topic was proportionally quite long compared to the topical application of not blindly trusting software/hardware technologies. There is a lot of content to be discussed about avoiding fanboyism and brand cults, and I think reaching that sooner would improve digestion of the material (especially at a tech conference).

If you're sticking with HTML, I'd suggest something like Reveal.js[1], which would let you lay things out with Markdown and full-page quotes/images.

[1]: http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/

Presentation skills were right up there for a first time speaker. As a practical application, I think you should definitely look into integrating Behat or PHPSpec2 into this presentation. Personally, the idea of having BDD language in test case doc blocks seems ripe for getting out of sync (we have that probably for doc blocks in real code already).

One thing I found missing from the BDD examples was the scenario description. Usually, you start with "As a customer/user/client, I want to" and that leads into the functionality. From a high level, it also lets you determine how features are grouped by stakeholder.

There's definitely a story to be told with having non-developers (e.g. product managers) create the BDD stories to describe the functionality the want implemented. Another idea that comes to mind is the relation to kanban project management, where features are tracked as user stories throughout the development process. If you decide to go the route of no tying this to Behat or some other library, you can definitely explore the kanban and PM side further.

Very comprehensive overview on the state of annotations in PHP. Much like the object calisthenics presentation, your code examples were easy to digest and there was a lot of meat in there for users to pick up and work with.

Really good talk, it finishes to drive home the point I also stated in my own talk. Both complement each other very well. Well delivered, with just a bit of restless moving on stage.

terrible quality :(