Writing Code That Lasts

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Anonymous at 17:01 on 8 Nov 2014

excellent

Awesome talk. Very entertaining and lots of great tips to improve code.

Anonymous at 17:03 on 8 Nov 2014

very good. Well explained and very engaged.

Anonymous at 17:04 on 8 Nov 2014

Awesome.

Anonymous at 17:06 on 8 Nov 2014

Nice job. Could have used a few more code examples when explaining the principles in the second half of the talk.

This was my favorite talk of the conference. Rafael employs an excellent mix of humor and technical details to deliver an informative and entertaining talk.

Inspirational. Great last talk of the day (besides the actual closing talk). Thanks Rafael.

Amazing talk! Very smooth, he didn't even have to look up to know what slide he was on. Just the right amount of humour, no awkward umms or ahhs, what a pro. Also gave us a lot to think on.

Plus, you can tell he really cares about helping everyone improve.

For me this was my favourite talk at the conference. It was both engaging and humorous. And even without a single code example, there was plenty to take away from the talk. It flowed very well, you only had to look at your screen once, which was amazing.

The only downside was the talk was so long that there really wasn't much time left for much Q&A.

Anonymous at 07:55 on 10 Nov 2014

I think you have a great presence when you speak and you speak very well, but I thought the talk was lacking any real meat.

You talked about a lot of things we all already know are important but never gave practical examples of how to apply them or get better at them. For example, telling everyone to follow the SOLID principles, or to write tests, or to try and make code easy to understand. We all already know we should be doing those things. Anyone who's not isn't choosing not to because they disagree, it's because they need help getting better at actually DOING them.

During the closing section about object calisthenics, you mentioned several times that it would be "easier to explain this with a lot of code" and "there's not enough time to show you an example" but a picture is worth a thousand words. You could have explained the concepts a lot more clearly with code examples. I feel like it took much longer to try and explain concepts like the Law of Demeter (one dot per line) through just talking than it would have with examples.

Your definition of instance variables also left a lot of people I talked to confused. An instance variable is any variable assigned to a property in an object, not just injected dependencies. So the rule about "no more than 5 instance variables" only means "no more than 5 dependencies" if you have no other instance variables.

The rule about not using getters and setters was not related to using properties instead. It was about following the "Tell, don't ask" principle, and focusing on treating objects as things with behavior instead of dumb data structures, so it still applies in PHP. It is about saying `$car->drive(10)` instead of `$car->setPosition($oldPosition + 10)`.

Again, you are a very charismatic speaker and kept everyone engaged, so hopefully you can use this feedback to capitalize on that talent and give people more concrete things to apply to their work.

In depth calisthenics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2AvoAzbGOE

This talk was too much fun :) The visuals were a delightful backdrop to a seriously engaging and entertaining delivery! Absorbed some great perspective on creating code with a useful long view, and took a pile of notes on how to be awesome speaker.