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

Entertaining and pragmatic talk from someone who's been there. Thanks Mark!

Where most people talking about gender and minority issues in tech do so in a polarizing and blame-heavy way, Christina provided an extremely compelling and positive viewpoint that really earnt my respect.

I truly enjoyed the positivity Christina conveyed. Her talk was more about how adversity empowered her to improve herself and others, instead of being more of the usual fare about victimization and blame. I have nothing but respect for that.

I'm going to be looking to get involved in Ladies Learning Code back home in BC. It seems like a great organization with a positive, productive goal. I look forward to being able to support empowering more women and girls to get involved in our field.

Maybe an OK talk for a track but not for a keynote. I expect keynotes to be relevant to the general theme of the conference. This wasn't about PHP.

I also think the talk needs more refinement and focus on what point it's trying to drive home. Wasn't sure firmly what the subject of the talk was.

Amanda brought some great information about API design, the value of APIs, and a number of important best practices.

Given that this was also a workshop, I offer the following suggestions:

I would have found it helpful to see a completed working example before we started, just as a frame of reference.

And a participant guide would have been helpful for me too. I noticed a few people got lost for various technical reasons, and a guide would have given them a way to catch up without waiting for someone to change back a few slides.
For example, another workshop I attended provided an online guide (gitbook) for each step of the workshop, which allowed everyone to work at their own pace, even if that pace had to vary from what the instructor was at. Here's a link to the guide:
https://pusher-community.github.io/real-time-laravel/
And a blog post about how they developed the guide:
https://blog.pusher.com/how-to-build-realtime-laravel-apps-with-pusher/
At one point they also provided a github repo with all the chapters broken into branches so participants could jump to a completed step in case they'd gotten lost due to lacking unrelated skillsets.

Amanda is knowledgeable and helpful, and was able to answer questions knowledgeably and effectively.

This workshop has a lot of potential, hence the offering of these suggestions which might help it run more smoothly.

My favourite talk hands-down. I hadn't read the talk description, so I wasn't expecting a BDD talk. I probably wouldn't have gone if I knew it was, but I'm really glad I did. Keith is an extremely compelling and engaging speaker. I really gained an appreciation for what BDD does for you, and I'll definitely be using it for client projects immediately.

Started with a good intro to docker, but the deis section was a confusing step-by-step without much explanation as to what each step was doing.

This talk is quite lacking in a lot of areas. There was very little in the content in terms of solutions or new information. Stories can be important for hitting points home, but the story she told here was very rambled through and disconnected from a delivery of what the importance was. Most of it was a reiteration of the same facts everyone already knows, but from one person's personal anecdotes. Minorities and women in tech are being marginalized, it's not acceptable, and it's uncomfortable for those experiencing it. What we need on this subject is a talk that outlines tangibles, what can *we* do about the problems? What real-world experiences and behaviours should we be paying attention to, to have an impact on the industry at large? What's our individual part in all of this? How should we be changing our thought patterns and ways of interacting? Again, if the talk was meant to just reiterate the problems we have, it certainly did fine. If it was meant to make a difference, there was very little to take away other than one person has had some struggles on a journey.