True North PHP 2015
5 - 7 Nov 2015 at Microsoft Canada

Excellent work Colin! Ambitious talk, but you totally pulled it off. Looking forward to hearing more talks from you in the future.

Awesome talk Beau. An honest look at how an open source project begins, and some of the struggles that come with it. The story kept everyone very engaged, and I think should have inspired people to just give open source a try.

Before the talk started expectations were set explicitly on what this talk would and wouldn't be, and it delivered exactly what was expected.

Excellent talk. The palette cleansers were a great idea. The only improvement I would make is to be a bit more refined and deliberate in the delivery of the palette cleansers; use them as a punchline rather than an interjection. A couple of times this was done really well, where there was a complex topic that was talked quickly about and building up, and then it cut to the gif as sort of an "exhale" and had some really good comedic timing.

A couple of other times there were some pretty long pauses before switching to the slides, which sort of interrupted the flow and slowed the momentum of the talk. Still definitely worth having though!

Great talk overall. At the beginning it seemed like the pace of speaking was too slow, but there was a very consistent rhythm to it and by the end of it I was really appreciating the winding, deliberate delivery. Great talk.

Has the roots of a good talk, but needs a bit of a push to get the rest of the way.

The big problem was that there was a large collection of anecdotes but they were not used to emphasize any particular point. In the "what we can do" slides, there were very few concrete details or examples, but mostly generalizations. There were opportunities to delve into really interesting explanations from a psychological perspective, but those were also unexplored, even though it seemed like they were about to be.

Overall, the talk seemed to go in many directions without really paying off in any of them.

I think tools like Elm are great for devs who want to learn some JavaScript but need some syntactic sugar

Excellent talk, easy to follow for being more technical. Very excited to implement MySQL 5.7 now, will bring tremendous speed improvements to my app.

My favourite talk of the day. Provided some good advice on how to tackle the spaghetti monster I inherited, and helped provide some perspective; I'm not in nearly as scary a situation as the one Mark described. Funny and entertaining talk to boot!

In the past I sampled many documentation tools including wiki, enterprise document sharing, markdown, sphinx etc. I was leaning towards sphinx but was never confident I was making the right choice. This presentation helped me to make up my mind on what is the correct way. It confirmed by dislike with wikies and like of restructured text with sphinx. Overall, I the presenter made me more confident about my workflow.

Good notes about use of language. In school, I remember being graded down for using active voice. I was taught that it is not professional to write in that style. However, in practice I always found documentation in active and it felt more natural. Glad that Allison clarified appropriate grammar needed for a good documentation.