ZendCon 2014
27 - 30 Oct 2014
at Santa Clara, CA Convention Center
Talk comments
Christian is an awesome speaker. He manages time well, is quick on his feet, and keeps the crowd engaged. I won't know how well this session prepared me for the certification exam until after I take the test, but my sense is that it will have helped quite a bit.
Great job as alway! I am tremendously impressed with how far Apigility has come.
The examples need some work.
The examples were a bit difficult to follow at times, several people without ZF experience seemed to get hung up on the Service Manager - having that type hinted may have helped. In addition there were quite a few code issues with the examples - for instance the missing Rhumsaa/uuid package.
Overall a great introduction to Apigility.
This was nothing like what I thought it would be based on the description. I was under the impression that this would be explaining how to use Zend Studio effectively to create an application. The actual tutorial was more of an explanation of how ZF2 works. Admittedly, most of the people attending seemed to have little to no experience with ZF2, which may have affected the speaker's focus. I don't believe that was really the case, though. The speaker also was jumping around between a prepared project and a new one that was generated on the fly. In order to hit all the points in the tutorial, he was unable to stop long enough to allow people to try and keep up in their own Zend Studio instance. This was especially frustrating because the tutorial began with a request to download Zend Studio, which implied that this would be more interaction.
It is easy to criticize without suggesting improvements, so I will give my thoughts as to how I would have run this tutorial.
1. Before the tutorial, I would have prepared the project itself on github. I would have prepared all my commits and released them as I was explaining concepts. Perhaps I'd set them up as pull requests and accept them as we moved through the code. This would allow the audience to continually update and would allow them to be more involved with the project.
2. Also before the tutorial, I would have recommended something like Vagrant be installed before beginning this tutorial. I would have had a virtual image prepped and ready with Zend Server installed and set up. This would have allowed me to explain how to develop using a remote machine with Zend Server. Later, we'd use another image as our "production" server, which would allow us to show how packaging and deployment to Zend Server would work.
3. I would make the tutorial slightly more interactive. I would explain how to do something, then later when I tried to do it again, I would ask to see if anyone could tell me what I needed to do. This would help reinforce what's being taught.
Overall, I think that this workshop had a lot of promise. The delivery just didn't live up to what I was hoping for. Zend Studio is a great and powerful tool, and there is a lot that you can teach that can help make building applications with it much easier. I was hoping to get more insight into ways that I can leverage it instead of building projects with other editors.
Great speaker, great content.
I've commandeered the "slides" link in the talk description to point to the workshop project's GitHub repository, which now has Readme file pointing to all of the presentation decks and other resources we covered during today's session. I also added some notes and code improvements for the default configuration files -- my apologies for not catching that before this morning!
Pros: Lots of very good advice from the trenches, about how to relatively safely, incrementally change a legacy code-base into a more modern code base.
Cons: Anal regarding code simplification for comprehension (but sometimes at the expense of much more source which seems counter-intuitive) (and sometimes at the expense of run-time code efficiency). Nothing regarding code comprehension of larger, inherited legacy code-bases :-(
I really liked that Rob had strong opinions and rational on some of the 'junk' that comes as part of the ZF2 library, and what to avoid.
I attended this class to prepare for the ZF2 exam, and while I'm not totally prepared, I learned a lot of the gap and have a better idea what to go cram for.
I wish the class had at least an extra hour, as there were important topics that were skipped for time. I see the service manager pattern all the time (which the class covered in depth), but rarely get to use the hydrators and forms components, so I was disappointed they were cut.
Overall this was a great talk.
Christian is an awesome speaker. He manages time well, is quick on his feet, and keeps the crowd engaged. I won't know how well this session prepared me for the certification exam until after I take the test, but my sense is that it will have helped quite a bit.