Advanced Composer - A Lot More Than Just ‘Install’ and ‘Update’

Before I get into things; I was clearly not the target audience for this talk. I could tell that from reading the abstract, and it's no fault of yours that I chose to attend this workshop; so please take this feedback in the context that presents.

I felt that this talk was extremely dry. I battled to pay attention, and the lack of interactive demos (even pre-recorded demos would have been fine) made this difficult. Audience participation helped offset this a little, but after an hour without typing, the audience seemed not to want to participate that much anymore (and by participate I mean put hands up).

It's not that workshops need live demos. It's that this one had nothing for attendees to do. There were no instructions for people following along (like "ok, let's install this bit of software so we can see how it works..."). It was just an extremely long talk about Composer command-line parameters and configuration variables.

For folks having only ever run install or update commands: this talk may be difficult but informative. It could be improved by involving attendees in some sort of example project.

For folks who use composer every day: this talk may be difficult and not entirely beneficial. It doesn't feel like the topic is exactly right for a workshop, in its current form. It could be improved by showing how to do things like create composer plugins or studying how different large projects arrange their dependencies or architecture (as relates to composer, like "how do Laravel and ZF arrange their dependencies and when does each strategy pay off...").

A smaller point: you seemed super nervous (understandable) and it carried through to your speech. Particularly in the use of "um" and "ah". It didn't distract too much from the content, but it could possibly be improved by _even more_ rehearsal or recording and listening to the post-first-hour content (when the effect became exaggerated).

Very informative. Much wow.

@Christopher Pitt
Thank you for taking the time to give such detailed feedback. I appreciate it

If you felt that my presentation was just "long talk about Composer command-line parameters and configuration" then you are correct that you are not the target audience and have missed the point. My apologies for not making this clearer in the talk's blurb. If I present this again, I'll try to better include attendees like you

This is the first time I've presented this topic in this format and I agree that keeping the involvement over a two hour duration is challenging. I did try vary style and pacing to help with this, but I will take your advice in terms of incorporating more differences in kind. I don't feel that demo's dont really fit this content though.

The only last help I can give now is to recommend that you dont come to my presentation on Design Patterns on Friday. It is also a information rich presentation on a niche topic in a similar style. If you didnt enjoy this presentation, you probably wont enjoy that one.

I was looking forward to this workshop, being a typical 'composer install/update' user of composer, and not having much exposure to its full capabilities. It was really informative and the concepts introduced were great to see and ponder over. The only reason this didn't get a 5/5 is because of the lack of practical exercise which I was expecting from a workshop. So this was more of a talk than a workshop to me, and after 2 hours without much audience engagement it did start to drag a little bit. But I still enjoyed hearing the ideas, and the practical joke at the end was a nice way to introduce newbie developers to the world of contributing to an open source project.

I'd recommend this talk for developers who only run 'composer install' type commands, and would like to learn more about what you could do with composer.

I found it exciting just to rub shoulders with the guy who wrote such an important application in the PHP world. Your humility and way of presentation just made me realize anyone can do it. Great job and thumbs up.

Hi, sorry Brad, I'm obviously not your intended target audience either. As I'm new to the world of PHP, I was just wanting to get more familiar with Composer as I'm a 'composer install' user. Barely knew what Composer was before attending the conference. Perhaps a little variation in addressing people at different experience levels.