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

Nice high level overview of many different packages. I would have liked to see more real world applications of the packages or perhaps a bit more detail on fewer packages. I know you were trying to show the breadth of the PHP communities contributions, but I am left with a feeling of "now that I know they exist what can I do with them?"

Nice talk. Learned about a few libraries I'll have to try.

Good talk...I sort of wish there'd been less "excuse my PHP quality" comments. I'm not a Selenium user and had only casually heard about WebDriver, so it was good to see what sorts of things it can do.

This talk was delivered very well, being someone who is more familiar with the Selenium2 PHPUnit extension, this was a great intro to Webdriver. Very good presentation as well, the talk was fun and paced well; easy to follow. Great job!

Thanks to all who attended the talk, and to those who gave feedback, here and in person. I am planning on giving this talk again, so I'll be incorporating the suggestions for my next go round, same as I did from the first presentation of the talk at GTA PHP.

Live demos are always risky, and having two out of three work is quite respectable. It was all the better that they interacted with the audience, too.

The audio issues and your cold aside, you definitely seemed nervous up there -- that may be something to work on for future talks. Beyond that, the content was excellent and you did a great job covering the basics of web-based socket IO before introducing your own work.

I concur with Joel. This had a very conversational and anecdotal theme, and I think that made the content all the better. It wasn't a merely list of best practices; rather, a review of lessons learned along the way.

As far as speaking ability, Laura Beth clearly knows what she's doing up there :)

Fun demos, and good content. I think you could improve the talk by giving examples that go beyond chat room type applications. Perhaps an example of doing push notifications when an action happens. I think you handled the technical difficulties really well.

The cohesion between the ten items seemed light (contrast to Rafael's "code sucks" talk, where he brought it back together at the end), but the content itself was solid and Mark did a great job talking through it. There were some timing/balance issues, where it felt we sped through some items much quicker than others (and not for lack of importance).

As an improvement, I think mixing in real world examples or stories from CakePHP's development would be beneficial. Most of us are used to seeing harmless alerts for XSS demonstrations, but seeing an actual attack would drive the point home and alleviate the need to explain "this looks innocuous but it can be something far worse".

The title was surely controversial, but it made for an interesting discussion. In particular, the build up to the reference to "A Soldier's Story" was quite nice. Overall, the subject was inspiring, the perspective was relatively unbiased (given Reg's polyglot background) and his speaking energy was solid.

To the previous comments, I don't think this would fly as a keynote at too many other conferences, but it seemed appropriate for today's even. Despite starting off late and light, I think it ended on a good note to start the morning.