True North PHP 2013
7 - 9 Nov 2013 at Microsoft HQ

Thanks stefan for the feedback. I am glad you enjoyed it. I know you came a long way and we really appreciated you being here. Yes, the wifi was a let down. The venue recently updated everything and I figured the wifi was also updated and so didn't come up with a backup plan. Next year we will be more prepared.

Thanks for the feedback @Crell. We did tell speakers in the OpenCFP that talk slots are 50 minutes, but we should have made that more obvious at the event. At one point last year, we had the schedule listing 50 minute slots, but the schedule got to be too busy and was difficult to read so we dropped it.

This was a very smoothly run conference, especially for one so small. Well done. About the only critique I would have is to have an explicit "passing period". Having sessions start 1 hour apart but not have an ending meant the last five minutes of a session and the first five minutes of the next turned into an informal passing period, but it was really hard as a speaker to know when to stop to let people get to the next session or when I should start talking because people had settled in to where they were going to go. Listing sessions as running from 11 to 11:55 or 11:50, and then the next starting at 12, would have made that a lot more predictable.

TrueNorthPHP is the best North American conference I've been to in the past couple of years. I feel really welcome as a speaker, as a person, as an attendee. The content is excellent. The venue is fantastic. Food is good (excellent vegetarian option!). The only problem, and I know you are aware of that, is wifi. You should seriously consider asking Microsoft whether next year you can bring in your own wifi, and then just put some access points in each room. That should do the trick.

Thank you. It was epic.