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

Excellent tutorial on salt and how it can automate managing your server configurations. Although I have not used vagrant and virtual box technologies, I am eager to try installing and working with salt. The tutorial was well organized with git sources to allow people to follow along and work through the exercises.
Justin was very knowledgable and the live demo was excellent. Mistakes usually happen during live demo, but there are great lessons to learn in debugging the problems. I found Justin's material well prepared and very easy to follow and understand. Thank you so much for the great tutorial.

Great introduction to Symfony2. It was well paced workshop to build an app that can talk to a database. I like how you guide us to make the modifications to customize the basic install, talking first and then letting us try.
What helped me to keep pace was that I had already installed Symfony2 before the tutorial. Perhaps prep would be better than waiting for people to install.
I felt that the slides showing the answers to prompts were removed too quickly before we could try the exercises ourselves.
You touch on the debugging tools of the dev environment, perhaps a an example of debugging a simple error would be helpful.
Thanks for the great tutorial.

Really informative session. I forgot to set up environment first and ended up with vagrant / virtualbox issues, but still enjoyed listening and will be giving Salt a try when I get back to work.

Stefan helped us slower participants as well as spending time with advanced topics. He helped us over the hurdle of installing Symfony as well as explaining how to make an application. Thank you.

Great introduction and took the time to explain everything. It was just what I needed.

Thank you.

Much knowledge was dropped on us, like an A-bomb. Had me excited about Ops.
That being said, I felt it was a little bit disorganized, with many "I'll get back to that" and "i'm getting ahead of myself". Also, because there was no forewarning that we'd need vagrant and salt box pre-installed, many of us wasted the first chunk of time trying to download it, install it, and get it up... which we didn't cover in the tutorial, so it meant some of us were very un-focused on the talk at the beginning, and feeling like we couldn't catch up. I did eventually catch up, though, and then I could focus on the content, and it was truly useful stuff.

Great intro to phing, various code analysis tools, and Jenkins. Definitely going to start using some of this stuff. Since it was branded as an extended tutorial, I would have liked a bit more hands-on with everyone, getting it working from scratch on our local systems. Could specify "system requirements" in terms of a VM in the talk description far ahead of the event.

That was very ambitious presentation explaining and live coding something of this complexity. Well done! Very detailed, good selection fundamental topics and even going around to help the attendees. Good balance between live coding, code screenshots, and having the viewers do the work themselves. Speed is just about right. Helpful walkthrough of basic directory and file structure. Good to have some files created manually instead of completely CLI to get understanding of what the console actually does and how to take over when needed.

Improvements:
(1) commands that we are expected to enter should not be covered up so quickly by a different program. Try to have CLI on a side, not behind, the IDE or browser. Difficult to quickly type the commands while trying to take in the information.

(2) prior to the tutorial post minimum system requriements that the viewers are expected to have. Tutorial next door earlier did not has as good content but had loads of time before the presentation to get the testing dev. environment ready before the presented went into guiding. Too much time was wasted going around fixing "basic" things such as php executable in path or pdo extension not loaded etc.
(3) (maybe, probably overkill for a simple demo but personally helps me understand better) use breakpoints to show how the request travels through the codebase and what the internal state of the object looks like.

Great intro to implementing Symfony2!

Thank you for your attention and patience.

It would have better if I knew what dev environment to pre-install on my machine before the event; the presentation/tutorial would have more efficient and I would have actually tried to code something during the presentation.

Stefan did a great job of walking us through the key steps in installing, configuring and beginning to build a Symfony application. This was my first exposure to the nuts and bolts of Symfony, I found myself impressed at the level of configuration and customization available in architecting an application. This fact was also well presented by Stefan. Thank you for an enjoyable afternoon.