It Was Like That When I Got Here: Steps Toward Modernizing a Legacy Codebase

Excellent talk that is relevant to every PHP developer no matter what your skill level. Paul is a fantastic speaker and I always come away from his talks feeling smarter.

Great talk with lots of good information and humor.

Great keynote with a lot of useful information on fixing/refactoring legacy code. Really glad I was able to attend, and I look forward to putting what I learned to good use. Definitely more confident and educated about working with legacy code than I was before.

This presentation was awesome! A great coverage of how to get started with reorganizing and optimizing an existing code base. This provided a clear simple pathway to clean up code leveraging autoloading and using dependency injection. We need more of these type lectures at every conference!

Awesome talk, Great flow easy to understand and very knowledgable on the topic. Like always Paul has awesome book recommendations!

Excellent talk with some excellent information!

Great talk with some excellent guidelines. I would really be interested in a follow up with the next steps mentioned (unit tests, etc)

Great job answering the question of "where to start" when refactoring spagetti code. It doesn't seem quite as overwhelming with some simple strategies to use.

Really Really good.
Quite impressed. Will definitely be using the autoloading PSR-0 technique.
Also loved the idea/practice of putting each class into a separate file based on the class name.
I'm totally guilty of putting multiple classes into one file. No more.
Thanks Paul!

Very clear and concise. The message was awesome and well spoken. He makes it seem so easy but reminds you how complicated it will be.

There is a reason I yelled out in the Q&A that this talk was awesome.

Great information

Good to see a common problem broken into a step by step process. Provides a means to begin tackling the refactoring process that any career PHP developer will encounter.

Awesome speech! Very helpful.

Going into these kinds of situations has very nearly made me give up coding entirely. These kinds of messes are just so incredibly horrible that it can be hard to know where to start cleaning up the mess.

The advice given here was exceptional and explained in great detail. Not only what to do, but why it should be done and what the expected result will be. It was so nice to know that someone else has not only felt my pain, but also has a good, solid plan to deal with it all.

Maybe next time I run into the writhing tentacles of Cthulhu I won't lose my mind. Maybe.

Amazing, informative and energetic. Gave me/us a full course of actions to update our system headache-free.

I thought he was describing my code base! Definitely useful and thought provoking.

Fantastic talk! I'm always a sucker for "here's an example of some horror you've seen, now let's clean it up!" Excellent reminder about the temptation to just throw everything out and rebuild...

One of the best talks to the whole event and hit home hard! Excellent practical advice that I an apply on Monday morning. Thank you!!

Great talk. Appreciated the focus on accepting reality and realizing that you cannot keep postponing the problem of dealing with poorly written code.

This was an excellent talk. I was certain he used my code in his examples, but I now understand how to get past that level of coding and move the code to a base that is simpler to maintain.

One of the best!

Paul is a great speaker with a great stage presence. My only comment is that the slides don't contain all of the code samples! (Slide which says "See editor")

Best talk of entire conference! I just want to know how he got into my code. I'm that idiot who didn't know any better....but I'm learning. Thanks for the great advice!!!

Very insightful talk about a very significant problem that plagues our industry. Starting small with a bigger goal in mind is definitely the way to go when trying to refactor any moderate-to-large size code base. It reduces risks and gives a more immediate feed back on what works and what does not.

One of the top few talks at the conference! Paul is always informative and has a great stage presence, as others mentioned. He had good examples and explanations, and his "incremental" approach gave me a lot to consider.