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

Great talk with a lot of tips and tools for better, more organized development. Only deducted 1 point for absence of lolcats.

Really liked this talk. Introduced me to a whole new world and I've already started a project that was a perfect candidate for Angular.

Excellent intro to GIT and excellent selection of topics to cover in a limited amount of time. Well done. For the many of us attending who routinely use git, an advanced session or a tutorial would be helpful, especially one focused on effectively maintaining and contributing to github-hosted open source projects.

There's more to setting up a continuous integration environment than installing code analysis tools and Jenkins, and while it's useful to have an extended intro to those code analysis tools I feel more time should have been spent on setting up Jenkins itself as well as setting up a working CI environment that included infrastructure and reporting options. Personally I would have liked at least some brief exploration of CI with git including automated trigger-based integration as well as other CI options like Sonar. Perhaps it's merely semantics, but If this was going to be an 'automated code analysis with Jenkins' tutorial it would have been better to set that expectation up front.

The slides were well organized, but the tutorial was not because Justin didn't follow the slides, jumping around and showing us lots of cool stuff but not in a way that made me feel that I ended up with either a good working knowledge of the basics of Salt or a working set of master/minions that I could use as the basis for setting up a multi-server, working, virtual PHP development environment. Perhaps that expectation is unrealistic for a 3-hour devops-focused tutorial at a PHP conference, but that is certainly what I hoped for.

I haven't attended the conference.

But looking at the slides I feel it was a great talk with great topics in it.

Excellent talk. We're working on a similar application for a large US-based TV network right now, and this could be very handy. Also, I'm a sucker for talks that allow us to commiserate about changing requirements etc. :D

Also was neat to see your "less is more" approach. I find that I often get bogged-down in the framework swamps of dagobah. Looks like Silex might be able to retrieve my x-wing.

It was extremely difficult to hear/understand you over the phone. Totally not your fault due to the passport issue, but for me it really detracted from the talk. It was obvious from all the articles and images that you put a lot of effort into the talk, and it certainly sounded like you had a flow going... I just couldn't (clearly) hear what it was :(

A for effort. C for absence.

Short & Sweet. A little *too* short, but very polished, and you obviously know your stuff inside-out. Might be good if you had some code samples ready to execute in case you finish early. Also maybe talk about how this fits into your workflow. That is, since it takes longer to run these integration tests, I assume you run them less frequently than (fast) unit tests. Do you only run them after dev is done and unit tests are passing, as a final check before sending to QA?