Opening Keynote - The Diabolical Developer

Brilliant

Didn't get it. Sorry.

Disappointing for a keynote. Whilst I appreciate what he was trying to achieve, the amount of sarcasm and deliberate curve-balls thrown made it difficult to appreciate when he was genuinely challenging established practice and conventional wisdom.

Maybe that was his point, in a meta kind of way.

Didn't really understand this.

Amusing crazy man! He managed to get a few pearls of wisdom in between a lot of anti-advice

Difficult way to try and open the conference. Needed to hit the "cartoon villian" note to really get the message across. Delivery wasn't consistent so I was left unsure as to what was sarcastic and what was your genuine opinion. When the whole presentation hinges on the comedic delivery, then it needs to be funny.

Brilliant. If you didn't get it then give up your development career now! Really thought provoking once the penny dropped (quite early on).

Although enough truths behind the curve balls to make you question everything....which was the the point (I think! )

I do think this talk was genius in it's subtlety, but I wasn't hungover or sleep-deprived. It might have been a tad too subtle for some.

An engaging and thought provoking presentation.

Martijn has a very pleasant voice (and dialect), and I love his presentation style with one sentence per slide. The concept around it, with an alter ego as the Diabolical Developer, is pure genius. I'm afraid the entire evil corporation plan he's planning is going to get big though:).

I agree with some of the critique, I couldn't always separate between when he was ironic and when he was serious, but I'm pretty sure I'm confusing it with actually being offended because I disagree. You will never take VIM from me!

It's always nice to hear from an outsider, and I think this was a funny, thought-provoking and well presented keynote. Keep it up!

Humorous and mainly tongue in cheek stuff. Not sure what the real point was but some food for thought. Should probably do stand up if the day job dries up.

Humorous and mainly tongue in cheek stuff. Not sure what the real point was but some food for thought. Should probably do stand up if the day job dries up.

Speaker was great, but the balance between sarcasm / jokes and serious notes was off.

If that is tuned the talk will probably be great. In it's current form this talk is not fit for keynote.

While sometimes it was difficult to know wether or not Martijn was being ironic or not, I really enjoyed the anti-advice. Refreshing to hear his thoughts about "doing things your way" instead of playing the ever-popular "best practices" ball. While I think best practices has it's place, I definitely think people should pick the ones that are useful for the situation instead of applying everything all the time - just because "it's best practice".

It's a tough act to pull off, delivering an anti-talk. Martijn started out in the right fashion, but his dry delivery made his salient points harder to spot. Initially he started out putting blue, cloudy skies behind the truth, but that convention disappeared fairly quickly.

As a talk to make one think about one is being told, it was fantastic. So long as people realised he wasn't serious for most of it - I hope everyone in the room did. I really hope so. - it was actually quite thought-provoking in that it caused us to analyze everything he said, and take each part with a pinch of salt.

With more clarity as to what was bad and good advice, this talk would have gone down a storm.

Absolute work of art! Many people may have missed the subtleties, but the use of sarcasm and anti-advice (of which some still contained a kernel of truth) really showed the true fuzziness of opinion that surrounds some of the subjects mentioned. Not everything is suitable for every purpose!

Very thought-provoking!

A very good thought provoking keynote. It did get confusing at times with the sarcasm but this also made you sit up and listen

I really hope there wasn't anyone who took everything at face value. That could be I retesting if listening into the conversation with their manager :p

Oh and an FYI zend studio 10 creates mobile apps from php and directly interfaces with the likes of Xcode in the mac. Php is growing up ;)

I really enjoyed the talk. It really demanded your attention from start to end, which I think was the point. You couldn't just sit and gloss over every statement, because every statement needed analysing as to what you thought of it. I've also found my code much easier to manage now I've put everything into one file. Top tip.

Question everything, the only real point of the talk... or was it?

Funny at times, but tended to jump from sarcastic to serious without any difference in tone, leaving the audience with the option of assuming that good practice references were serious and outrageously bad ones were jokes. Although it was funny and caused some good laughs, people who could have learned from the talk probably won't since they'll be unable to actually understand when was he speaking of bad or good practices.

I found this keynote quite funny at times. However, I struggled to work out when he was being sarcastic and when he was making a serious point.

This keynote could be very good... if not the lack of consistency. I was often very confused and could't make it out when Martijn was serious and when he was joking. It actually turned into a bit of a rant at some point and that when he lost my attention.

On the other hand, he finished big style with a great conclusion that got me thinking.

This talk needs improving and after that it can be a very memorable and useful talk.

Lots of fun, but pretty difficult to separate the good advice from the deliberately appalling. Would have been better presented as an out-and-out comedy piece perhaps.