OK, the title/summary probably says enough, I thoroughly enjoyed the conference,as I have on previous years.

The change in venue this year to the former Ramada Manchester, was actually beneficial I think, as I managed to secure a room there
having the conference 4 floors down from your own room was extremely useful, I never had to queue for the gents, a big conference problem
as these things are largely full of geeky men. That puts me on a tangent – more women needed, if you are a woman reading this please attend these type of conferences if you can. They are great and you will come away with a great deal of info and I know there are some awesome women developers in our industry. I go to conferences to learn from awesome developers I don’t care what sex you are. There were a few there but really they are underrepresented at every conference I go to. As far as I am aware there was only one woman speaker, see review later. Anyway it’s up to you guys(ladies etc) but all I can say is I would welcome more women over to the geeky white side.

There were a range of exhibitors, and I was impressed by the content, even though a lot of them were recruiting and I wasn’t looking for a job they were still happy to chat. If you were looking for a job in PHP and weren’t there then sorry you missed out, it was definitely the place to get a good PHP job. One thing I like about this a other geek conferences there was a good selection of books for sale, in this case thanks to O’Reilly, at reduced prices. So that was good too.

I came away with a interesting coffeescript book – as that is something I am playing with at the moment.

Registration is often challenging at conferences and as I was helping out I am going to have to say it was good, but I do feel we got a lot of people through with minimal confusion.

So what for next year would I suggest if anything. Maybe the conference organisers Emma ,Ian , Jeremy and his team if they remain at the venue could try and swing some exclusive room rates. And maybe relocate the tea/coffee stations or have more smaller ones, during the breaks as this area often got crowded.

All in all as before I continue to urge people to attend it is well worth it.

Ian surely know’s his stuff, I have seen him speak before and thought that too. He used skate video production to demonstrate how the particular talents involved there improved by inspiring skaters to “land that trick” because others before them had and push things just that one bit further. He inspired with a mix of historical computing references, and obvious knowledge to encouraged people to work with and build on what has gone before. Definitely inspiring stuff and I certainly came away from it eager to do just that.

Ben gave us a run down on the HTTP protocol and the role that plays in REST, and an example of creating a REST service, using his site (fdrop.it) as a example. It was good, there were a few takeaway messages, I learnt a bit about using media types and the role of hypermedia in a restful service and picked up the use of RestConsole a chrome add-on as a tool. I feel actually it could have been a bit more in depth about differing output formats and problems associated with, the examples of it on his site were good but that appeared to be only outputting one format type (application xml/xhtml), when we are building these services we tended to use multiple formats.
But the concepts were definitely there and presented well. Personally I did not need the lesson on HTTP protocol and hopefully others didn’t too. If people are not aware of the basics then they should be, if they call themselves web developers<rant>.

I have used PHPUnit for quite a while and advocate unit testing to anyone so this talk was a must see for me.

Sebastian kicked off by saying he may be bias so set the tone. But overall gave a good roundup of the tools out there. I was introduced to a couple which until that time I had not heard of Atoum and Behat. I am starting to look into Behat as I feel I could use it, as I would like to do some BDD (Behaviour driven development). But ultimately this does not replace just enhances test driven development in my mind.

PHPUnit came out on top, in my opinion, of the others, and that was not because of speaker bias. Whilst the talk gave comprehensive coverage of the tools, I felt the example used to demo some was a bit weak and for others there was no example.

But ultimately introduced me to more things beyond phpunit , job done.

Note see my review on the Behat talk for more info into one of the tools.

As I was room manager for this talk I may have not got as much out of it as if I had paid full attention.

A good round up. It included code samples and good solid explanation of when to use varnish, and the types of configuration. I felt we could have had a little more on basic installation and configuration and as I am not familiar with Magento the code samples whilst good I did not quite understand where to implement them or even if they were needed at all.

All round a very good presentation and the slide takeaway is very useful (and hosted on speakerdeck a much nicer service than slideshare IMHO), I will be looking into this further.

I thought this talk was very good, Ben presented well and gave a simple thorough understanding of a topic that to me at least is relatively new, and I think in PHP circles I am not alone. His enthusiasm was apparent through the delivery of the topic and the examples were very good and readily understandable.

A few people noted a couple of typo’s in his slides, but the fact they could spot these I think shows how well the speaker explained the facts. The slides were obviously specifically prepared for the conference and
time and effort had gone in to them.

The use of Behat was clearly show and the examples increased with complexity as the talk progressed.

Ben was obviously very knowledgeable on the topic and was also ably assisted by a colleague in the audience on a couple of questions (thankfully not too much as I feel that would have been a distraction). For me the best session of the day.

I thought this talk was interesting, I have kind of admired what Etsy have done with the whole continuous deployment process. Pushing code every 20mins is certainly admirable.

Laura’s experience showed that she knows her stuff. I am not sure I was a fan of her presentation style though (personal opinion), it was a bit shouty/relaxed and sometimes confrontational. Sadly it appears others agreed with me

It was billed as “we will look at coding and testing patterns inspired by a real PHP project. We will also discuss how to identify patterns and make small adjustments where testing is and is not helping.” I did not find that. She explained she had created a code standard for monitoring testing and had a view of what should be tested which I found refreshing, I imagine seeing more of that would have helped. I was certainly interested in that part. Overall not the best of the talks on testing on the day, and it seems I attended quite a few.