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

I think I might be biased by a soft spot for functional programming, but I really enjoyed your talk. I thought the organization and pacing was good, and it was well delivered. I'm familiar with SML, so I didn't have trouble following along with the code, but I'm not sure how it would be for someone with less experience in FP. The demo of the rewinding debugger was super fun! Front end isn't really my strong suit, but this talk made me excited to try it out. Thanks!

I also attended the Behat tutorial on the first day, and I thought this complemented it well (and vice versa). I really liked your initial diagrams describing what roles the different tools fill, and I thought the progression of the talk was very organic and it made a lot of sense. I got lost for a moment arounds stubs / mocks, but you provided a number of general attributes / definitions that helped. Very helpful and informative!

I really liked how you structured the narrative, it was very engaging and illustrated a wide variety of situations women / minorities face.

Most of all I appreciated the concrete tips and information about mentoring. I took a class in college* about the pipeline problem and ways to address it. Your talk hit a lot of the same points, and we didn't have nearly as much helpful information on mentoring. I'd love to send a recording of the talk to the professor, if one exists.

*http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~cfrieze/courses/

The speaker kept the audience engaged by keeping the talk fun and lighthearted. Although my experience with AngularJS was very limited, I felt they were able to clearly get their message across and explain the strengths and weaknesses of using the language.

The use of Github branches (github.com/caseysoftware/is-your-api-misbehaving) for all the different steps of the tutorial was super helpful. There was also a clearly established routine for each exercise - generate the test functions, fill them in, evaluate results, repeat. This felt a little repetitive, but I think in this case that's a good thing - I knew what to expect and it was easier to absorb the information, with principles being reinforced each time.

I found it really easy to follow, but if I had only the github tutorial / code I would have a harder time figuring out what was going on. I would maybe flesh out the readme a little more with some directions on how to run through example scenarios and which files to pay attention to, in case people want to refer back to it or share with people who didn't attend. There are only a couple files that are changing with each step, so this is an easy thing to add that would really help.

Good talk and good energy!

Davey's instructions (http://dshafik.github.io/deis-docker-workshop/) are amazingly comprehensive and thorough; I kind of fell behind, but since the documentation is so good I can easily pick it up again on my own. I also thought he did a good job of being calm and rolling with it when people ran into technical problems (as inevitably happens). There was a lot of information packed into this tutorial, I feel like it could have just been Docker and I still would have thought it was worthwhile. I also liked that he started off with an outline of how much time he would spend on each section (X amount of time for Docker, Y amount of time to get Deis running, etc) and he stuck pretty close to that.

The 12 app methodology portion seemed a little bit tacked on at the end. By the time we got there my brain was kind of worn out so I didn't absorb it as well. You could probably leave it off and still have a cohesive presentation, or maybe move it up to the introduction as suggested by another reviewer.

Overall very helpful and useful!

Thanks all. I'm torn about which ones to drop but happy to take some advice and input. :)

+1 to what Chris Tickner said.

I still don't understand this one as a keynote.

The stories might have been interesting individually if any of them had been deep but they all felt like offhand throwaway comments. Worse, I couldn't see what the common threads were connecting them.

Opening keynotes are generally used as an introduction to set the tone and direction of an event but this one felt like an aside that didn't tie into anything else going on.

Thanks for the feedback on this one. I sincerely appreciate it. :)

The next time any of you are in Austin, drinks on me. Well, one..