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

Good keynote - slides were a little bit text heavy. But a lot of really good points, suggestions and ideas for getting involved with mentoring.

Enjoyed!

A great keynote on a very current subject, love the backgroud story telling a lot.

A few pointers for improving your presentation:
- Be consistent in using capitals in your bullet points (do not mix capital/non-capital character beginnings).
- Don't use full sentences in bullet points, people start reading and stop listening to what you're saying. Keywords are better or use a single keyword with a picture to create the atmosphere around the subject of the slide.
- While speaking, you sometimes mumble when you're really excited telling a story from your own experiences. As a non-native English speaking attendee it's a bit hard to follow the story.

Good introduction to composer. Even though I already use it I still found useful information in it especially regarding version constraints in your package. I think it would be pertinent to the talk to maybe include reference to the ability to include VCS repos in composer as well as I feel some people are not aware of that functionality and considering the talk is on "managing dependancies" that bit of info kinda fits in there sorta? *shrugs*

I feel I should have heeded your advice at the beginning, about it being more of an introduction and maybe should have seen other talk only because I was familiar enough with it that I didn't really get as much from the talk as someone new.

animated personality fully capturing attention. Practical stories and similies effectively getting the point across. I did not understand the difference between BDD test and Unit Tests but after his introduction it became clear to me what each one does. Real job problems are well tied to theoretical defintions. Clear transition from general discussion to technical details (eg. gherkin example).

Well prepared with ready to go git branches to follow. I consider this a critical component of a tutorial. This made experience less stresful knowing there is a path for me to follow. Also great for studying the material after the presentation. Following along through the command samples and code in the repository was very entertaining and educational. Important issues audience should get just right to not have problems are well highlighted. Very good progression starting from non-existing code, to broken test, to fixed code, pointing out what every output means and how it relates to the code.

One thing I think needs improvement is not having each step as throw away. All work done in one branch was reset when moving to next branch and next branch had code previous one did not, as opposed to using branches as "safe checkpoints" if mess up. I also did not realize for some time that the php file is not actually the code being tested, that the .feature describes and does some semantic analysis to know what functions to run, but was actually the test code against the subject API.

Thank you learned a lot!

Presentation style was excellent. Well spoken, willing to assist, good material. Interesting to see the process unfold from start to end. Shows solid knowledge of the material.

On the downside, I could not follow it. I was confused during the transition from memcached container during demo to LAMP one. By the time I realized that was just a demo and was not meant to be followed, I could not adjust quickly enough to what is actually being worked on, because Dockerfile was frequently being closed. There was lots of time given to get AWS and Deis working because of loading time. Same amount of time should have been given to displaying Docker file on the screen so that everyone could adjust to what is being worked on and to package naming conventions for those who are used to other package managers other than Ubuntu. There should also not have been two different projects between demo and hands on sections to both avoid confusion, and awkward mental switch which was harder to do while trying to focus on new to me Docker technology. Actual configurations should also have been prepared ahead of time. There was a deis-docker-workshop in the git repository that looked like a great one to work on so not sure why had to come up with one on the spot. Extra jumping between configs also made it hard to understand what was intended to be followed and what was just demo to show results.

On the upside, Deis and AWS procedure was much more structured and easy to follow. Questions were answered well. Important points that official documenation may lack were pointed out where needed. I am glad to learn about 12factor deployment rules, which I will try to follow in the future. Good opportunity to evaluate container workflow for long time VM users.

Learned a lot in this tutorial, appreciated it a great deal! Covered a ton of territory.