ZendCon 2016
18 - 21 Oct 2016 at Hard Rock Hotel & Casino

Mr. Wathan's talk was one of the best and most useful that I attended. TDD requires completely revising one's approach to development, and until one is experienced in TDD, the approach feels incredibly foreign and unintuitive. This talk helped me "wrap my head around" TDD because it utilized a live-coding segment in which the speaker built a simple "Tweeter" application using TDD in Laravel.

Mr. Wathan is clearly an excellent developer; he is able to navigate his IDE and terminal with extreme efficiency and I was very impressed with his ability to live-code for nearly and hour without making any mistakes (barely a typo!).

I will eagerly attend any of his future talks.

Mr. O'dell delivered a well-conceived and organized talk with engaging slides. He speaks very clearly and articulately and I enjoyed listening to him.

The talk is very high-level and is, in my opinion, aimed at junior developers and others who have done very little debugging. As a senior developer, I would loved to have seen more specific instruction regarding specific tools (such as xdebug), and I probably would have attended a different talk had I realized that the talk would be fairly generic with regard to the debugging approach.

That said, I would absolutely recommend this talk to new developers and managers who code to some degree.

Mr. Adams was a bit under the weather, and I appreciated his willingness not to cancel his talk as a result. I'm a senior developer and will be introducing further automation into my organization's testing, build, and deployment processes, so I was interested in using Phing to handle the build portion.

The subject matter is a bit dry (pardon the pun), by its very nature, but Mr. Adams added a dash or two of humor to keep everyone engaged.

I definitely have a better sense of what Phing is designed to do. When I went into the talk, I wasn't sure whether it is a replacement for tools such as Jenkins, or whether it complements them (turns-out to be the latter). I learned just enough to feel confident that Phing is worth exploring as a candidate tool for furthering the extent to which our build process is not only automated, but extremely resilient.

My only recommendation would be to ensure that slides are scalable so that they consume the entire monitor, regardless of its resolution. The images used throughout the presentation were quite small relative to the size of the projector, which Mr. Adams acknowledged and will presumably correct going forward.

This talk was a great introduction to Laravel. Showcasing everything that Laravel has to offer in the space of an hour is an impossible task, but Mr. Otwell fared well in this regard.

I've been working with Laravel for two years, so most of this information was review for me, but I did glean two very useful tips that made the session well worth attending. (Implicit binding in route definitions, and the ability to dependency-inject via type-hinting on any controller method, not just the constructor!)

Mr. Otwell's command over Laravel is absolute. At the end, I asked him several non-trivial questions regarding Laravel's IoC implementation and he live-coded his response and "nailed it"; very impressive. I really appreciated his willingness to answer my three-part question.

As an OSS project maintainer and contributor to numerous OSS projects, most of this information was review, but there were a few very valuable bits of knowledge that I gleaned from the talk, and in particular, the fact that there are automated FOSS tools available to scan third-party libraries for compliance-related issues (not to mention CVE issues), such as Fossology.

Mr. McLoughlin was very well spoken and articulate in his discourse. I was shocked to see how few people attended the talk, given the relative ubiquity and prevalence of our industry's reliance on OSS. A very worthwhile subject to cover, in my opinion.

Thank you Cal for a great closing keynote!

As with his previous talk, Mr. Butts demonstrated mastery over the subject matter and the related tools. His ability to deliver a live tutorial with no apparent "cheat-sheet" was rather impressive. He built a fully-functional middleware chain involving several components (a string manipulator, a basic HTTP authenticator, and a basic view cacher) in real-time, and did an excellent job of explaining each step as he went along.

Mr. Butts' depth of knowledge regarding this subject is staggering. He presented a tremendous amount of information in an hour and in so doing, he provided a full "recipe" for high-availability infrastructure. He speaks authoritatively and from professional experience, and it's immediately apparent that he is an expert where this subject is concerned.

His slide-deck can be considered an extremely valuable, high-level roadmap to implementing the associated technologies.

I'm pleased to see that Mr. Butts is delivering a couple other talks and I will be attending them.

Mr. Wenz was slightly difficult to understand, mostly because he spoke very quickly (hey, being excited about the subject matter is a good thing!), and to be fair, he covered a lot of material in an hour. Nonetheless, his message was well conveyed. The information presented is a must for any web developer to understand and integrate into daily workflow.

We ran out of time for questions from the audience, but I was confused as to the recommendation regarding ETags and Expires headers. One slide suggested that using these headers is imperative for maximum HTTP performance, but a subsequent slide suggested that their use creates an abundance of undesirable 304 (Not Modified) responses. But isn't that the whole point of using these headers -- to prevent browser-cached content from being re-requested and re-sent? Clarification in this regard would have been very helpful.

As a developer who has been using Laravel for about two years, and as the proprietor of an open-source project, I was very interested in Mr. Otwell's perspective and experience. The talk was informative and inspiring.

Overall, Mr. Otwell's message was well-received and it was fascinating to learn more about the overarching methodologies that underlie Laravel's development.

I will be attending his other talks.