How To Avoid Database Migration Hell

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Luke Lowrey at 15:45 on 23 Aug 2016

Too much of the talk was leaning towards the basic of "how to make a migration" or "how to make a seed" which seemed to be pitching at a too basic level considering the people who would attend a talk with this title. The latter half was more interesting on the scope of how you can use specific types of Seeder classes, other DB pitfalls and ways out of them. More of that would be great!

A monotonous / rushed tone of voice made it tricky to follow at times. Remember: breathe. A bit of an overuse of the term "I think" too. It's nice to hear an authoritative tone of voice, as it gives the feeling the speaker knows what they're on about.

Michael Teeuw at 19:46 on 23 Aug 2016

Nice tips and suggestions. Interesting talk!

Far toooo easy.
Next time start with summary and show more real.examples.
Thats what i wanted to see and hear

But the talk was good.

Good intro for migrations, but not the right target group. Started to slow / basic, even when the audience showed that everyone was already using migrations / seeds. Did have some helpful tips at the end. For people not familiar with migrations, this would be very good.

Good talk, some of the details about faker and doing those migration stuff could be replaced with some live migration examples.

Adam McDonald at 23:50 on 23 Aug 2016

The delivery was good, but about much of the talk seemed to just be telling us much of what the documentation already does. Had the title been "Introduction to Migrations" this would have been a fantastic talk, though. A few tips for the future would be to breathe a bit more. The nerves started to show a little (which I don't think anyone would blame you for!), which made you speed up in some parts.

Totally agree with Luke Lowrey about the monotonous tone and speeking to fast, so it felt like putting a 80 minutes talk into 60 minutes.
Content of the talk was too basic, could have been more advanced at start.

Jerry Hof at 14:56 on 24 Aug 2016

basic stuff that can bore you :)
I expected more complex situation and tips and tricks

Tim Hyde at 15:33 on 24 Aug 2016

Some useful ideas, and well presented.

Though I think using seeds rather migration for some setting type stuff, is not necessarily the best way. On a recent project we ended moving in the opposite direction on this to what you guys did.

I haven't seen all of the presentation, but the first half hour kind of disappointing to me. It was all about what are migrations and seeds and how to use them, but as a Laravel developer you probably already know that. This talk would have been interesting for a different public (maybe to convince developers to start using Laravel)..

martin morlog at 14:05 on 25 Aug 2016

way too 101 for this audience, as realised by speaker when getting 90% affirmative on asking 'who of you already uses migrations and seeds?'.

Mark Starkey at 15:02 on 25 Aug 2016

nothing new that hadn't already been covered in the docs an by a dozen tutorials, he came across well and held the talk together, but felt the subject wasn't expanded past the basics.

Jochem Fuchs at 13:12 on 26 Aug 2016

The presentation in itself was good and Edward explained everything quite clearly despite being obviously nervous. So perhaps I should've rated higher, but what I want to make clear is simply how important it is to know your target audience or to be prepared if the level of knowledge is very different from what you expected.

You asked two very important questions at the start:
- How many people here have used migrations
- How many people have used seeds

More than 90% of the audience raised their hands. And at that point I hoped you would've just skipped all the entry level stuff and headed to more advanced cases.

The title itself is probably the most important reason for feeling let down. It suggests that it was about the edge cases, where the migrations fail or where you want to do advanced migrations or anything other than migrations 101.

Robert Settle at 16:56 on 26 Aug 2016

As others have mentioned I think the talk did start off too basic - considering the audience - but there was still a lot of useful insight provided during the latter stages of the talk concerning the ideas of using environment specific seeds, and a couple of other tips. It was very easy to hear and understand the speaker and overall I think it's worth watching for anyone working on larger projects.

Considering the title of the talk I thought there may have been more advice affecting longer term projects which have lots of and lots of migrations. For example, having migrations that undo what has been done in a much older migration, and changing column names/types etc.

I picked up some interesting thoughts, but I agree with Luke Lowrey. It felt a bit too basic.
Migrations is one of the first things one (should) learn when working with Laravel, so maybe I wasn't the targeted listener for this, but I also think that people visiting Laracon have at least a bit more knowledge about the framework and thus it felt a bit too beginner-friendly.
Also the speaker talked about putting seed data into the migrations, which I never seen of even heard of (doesn't mean people never does it though).
I would love to see some more in depth regarding how to splitting stuff, the reasoning behind it and how to do it, instead of explaining what those things are.

Alexander Feil at 17:35 on 1 Sep 2016

Had hard times to follow you. Since I'm not a native speaker, you talked very fast.
Your slides looked good - but about 90% of the talk was basic stuff. Every Laracast user - and I think there were many in the audience - had already seen these migration methods.