An introduction to Laravel 4

Very in-depth introduction to Laravel. For me, maybe a little too in-depth. Would've liked to see a comparison to other frameworks, and why we should pick Laravel in the future. At the end of the talk, I had a perfect overview of how Laravel works, what it's main components are... But I was not convinced to give it a try.

To the speaker, I'd like to say: very brave to do your first talk in English, but I would suggest getting comfortable speaking before groups first (while talking Dutch) and only when you're comfortable, switch to English. It seemed to me the speaker was quite nervous (understandably), but it impacted his English, which made some things difficult to understand.

Congratulations on your first talk! Thank you for spreading the word about this beautiful new framework.

For me, already being a Laravel lover, everything was clear, but maybe for other people some topics could have used a bit more explanation to reveal the real stength of the framework. But I understand the trade off: there are so much nice features and the time is so short...

I don't blame you for not being an expert in other frameworks, but all the Symfony and ZF people in the room might have wondered what makes Laravel stand out from the other ones. If you keep your learning spirit, you will gain the experience to tackle this kind of broader topics.

Overall, very well done!

I agree with the previous reviewers. Good job for a first time!

You seemed nervous and moved around a lot, I expect you'll quickly improve with practice though.
You handled questions on things that you simply didn't know pretty gracefully (these things will always happen, if you don't know, you don't know) however next time you may try enlisting the audience to help you.

As for the content, as a veteran of many frameworks you haven't really convinced me to try Laravel. Try picking on other frameworks, "look at all this obtuse code you need for Symfony in this example, here is the same in Laravel!".

Again, good job!

You were quite nervous, but that's understandable. Don't be intimidated, you handled your first talk quite well.

As for the topic. I already had a look at Laravel before and didn't like all these static calls, and I'm still not convinced this is good. It will potentially lead to people adopting imho wrong coding habits, creating virtually untestable code.

It could be useful if you had a look at other frameworks as well, so you can explain why a certain feature is handier with Laravel than with framework X (best limited to one framework per feature though :p).

And sorry about the grumpy comment regarding Blade templating (it might have sounded a bit harsh), but I hate it when people reinvent the wheel just to make the same thing over and over again. The time spent doing that could be used to improve already existing (and good, already tried and tested) libraries instead. After looking at the Blade docs, Twig definitely has got *lots* of extra functionality. So I think you really should look into Twig and maybe try to get support for it into Laravel :p.

Well done first time speaking! Just keep doing these speaches and you will get better every time. The think you should tell your audience why Laraval is a real framework and not just Symfony with some extra's. In my opinion you could do this by going less into details and have a more "hands on" approach. Maybe make a real simple hello php app in a few lines of code and explain Laravel MVC from that example.

Thanks for making me discover the framework.