Intro to Laravel

Thanks to Derek for the good intro to Laravel!

Need more practice prior to delivering talk. Spoke well, but "on the fly" thinking about what to say next was obvious. Liked that there was a bunch of code, but needed just a bit more "intro" to cover overall architecture prior to digging into code. Covered a few nice "gotcha" tips.

As one who has not spent any time with Laravel, I was looking forward to learning about the topic. To my dismay, the session consisted of code scrolling and modification. I would have appreciated coverage of the framework at an abstract level and, in particular, the theory behind it. In short, I would have liked to see an introduction instead of a demo.

I can't remember if this is a thing or not, but I think I've heard that "live code" is a hard thing to pull off well for a talk. I think that was definitely the case here. The slides were reasonably well laid out otherwise (big overviews) so I think that the overall direction was pretty nice but switching screens and live code editing was very distracting.

Despite the difficulties a general overview of some high level Laravel concepts was delivered. I think that it might have been more difficult for someone new to many of these concepts to follow, though?