ZendCon 2015
19 - 22 Oct 2015 at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino

Informative and funny. Will be interesting to know the PHP roadmap.

This was more like "how to configure your Microsoft cloud server to run Wordpress at scale. Cory gave appropriate disclaimer that it was going to touch on Microsoft servers, but I wish the "lessons learned" we're more conceptual and applicable to other platforms. Most of the talk was walking through configuration screens.

Nice introduction to why every PHP developer should obsessively know the ins-and-outs of arrays. The title was a bit misleading; ZF2 does use arrays extensively so I get the connection, but this talk was as much about ZF2 as a talk about static methods is about Laravel. Beyond that the talk was well structured and paced, Michelangelo engaged the audience with questions as well as he could from the big stage, and had some really well-chosen examples to illustrate why a solid knowledge of PHP Array and the accompanying functions is so critical to building performant applications. Overall a great talk!

Matthew and Julien worked very well together to provide a great introduction to Apigility for those who hadn't previously been exposed to it. Unfortunately the time slot was far too small to cover everything so I left feeling that they had covered the easy bits but, like nearly every presentation I've seen on Apigility, skimmed over the authentication and authorization pieces. The Vagrant setup bundled with the example code was very complicated and overkill for this purpose; a simple LAMP stack from PuPHPet would have sufficed and may have increased the success rate for attendees getting the code running. The example app could be run using a local PHP install and SQLite so I think most were still able to play along. Despite the few hiccups it was a great introduction to Apigility and a very convincing sales pitch on why you should use it.

Well-structured and paced. Gary did a fantastic job with this tutorial, clearly explaining the "why" along with the "how" at each step of the refactor. I would have liked to see testing integrated as part of the refactor, but the subject matter was already constrained by the length of the tutorial slot so I can appreciate why it was not included in the agenda. The parts about removing boilerplate from ZendSkeletonApplication should hopefully be irrelevant soon as there's a PR over there to remove most of that stuff. The only real issue I had was that the Vagrant configuration bundled with the code repository was incomplete (no database configured) and so took some manual fiddling to get running. With the emphasis on playing along during the refactor it would have been convenient to be able to "vagrant up" and have a fully working application.

Entertaining talk with some very cool tech, but it felt a bit out of place at a PHP conference. I have no gripe with that and do think that siloing into PHP alone is a bad direction, but looking past the flashy demos it felt like an Intel sales/superiority pitch (a "look at how amazing our engineers and toolkits are" kinda thing) and that always feel out of place at community-oriented conferences. Beyond that it was nice to see where the cutting-edge of client-side technology is and what is coming down the pipe.

Not the most exciting material, but Wim's presentation style made it an entertaining and engaging session. The real-life examples really helped underscore why knowing a little about the services your code consumes can go a long way to preventing problems down the line. I picked up a few good nuggets of information, like MySQL covering indexes and how the non-atomic-ness of file_(get|put)_contents can ruin your day. Well done!

As someone who's never used Laravel I found this talk to be a good introduction to the high-level features and functioning, though it was much more about how the individual components work than about how to build a proper application with Laravel. I suspect that was the intent, and I did like the presenting method that it allowed: scrolling down through a single file one example at a time and explaining each.