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

Great overview of how to work on a remote team. Lots of useful tips.

As a fundamentals talk, it felt a bit distracted in terms of topics covered. Waylaid into tools commonly used with Angular, but unrelated to the framework itself at one point. Could have used more practical examples. Speaker kept a fairly fast pace with rare pauses. Talk seemed to go into a lot of depth with low-level framework features for the time allotted. No time was left for Q&A.

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.

Very good presentation. Nick was well prepared, easy to hear, and his talk was packed with good information.

Good presentation. Stefan has a deep understanding of Symfony 2 and is able to effectively relate that information to the attendees.

Thanks to Derek for the good intro to Laravel!

The information that was presented was good. However, I could not hear much of what was said. I was in the center of the room so I do not believe that the audio system was the problem. I think that Sean was speaking quickly and not enunciating well.

Nice talk, very entertaining. It was interesting to see the things that your team has done to build a closer sense of community despite the 9 hour timezone spread. :)

In particular, I liked the points made about spending money on the tools so you don't have to worry about them. It seems "super easy" to "just setup a git repository" and "just install (teamcity|jenkins|hudson|whatever)", but actually managing those tools is an ongoing job. If you can hand it off to tools like GitHub, BitBucket, Travis, etc, it frees your team up to focus on other things and makes the responsibility for those someone else's job. On the flip side, though, it means that you rely on someone else to fix business critical things if they go down. :) As long as everyone is aware of the trade-offs, it is a really nice direction to go in.

I was on the far right side of the room and I too found it hard to hear some things. I think it is possible there were mic issues but I could actually hear most of it pretty well. I think that some things were said too quickly otherwise I might have been able to hear them despite any audio glitches.

Good talk. Good summary - I use many of these tools and concepts daily, but there were a few good ideas that I'll takeaway to introduce to my team.

One big problem: the audio in the room "stage left" was off, so could hardly hear the presenter. Fail Microsoft Conference Center.

Nice overview of how a very dispersed team is able to conduct daily business. I now have some tools to research that integrate with IRC communications within a team.