Mark Niebergall

Great presentation with good discussion about additions and deprecations with PHP 5.5.

Great coverage of how to setup composer, explanation of how to use composer, and what the benefits are.

Presenter was knowledgeable, entertaining, and had great examples for traits. Talk was focused and made good points.

Excellent talk with extremely knowledgeable - well done Pauli. It was great to show the php source code and explain some of the internal workings.

Great examples and good current information.

Good details and insights for authentication and authorization. Well prepared and covered pertinent information.

Great talk - covered a broad spectrum of good practices and made really good points.

Great presentation overall. Good use of examples and references for further learning. Enjoyed discussion at the end especially.

Good explanation of how to dig into the logs to determine path attacker took. There were some good insights regarding how an attacker may take their time to attack once they have a back door in place.

Hilarious! Great slides and good comic relief.

Excellent points made and very well presented.

Great breath and introduction to php concepts and tools. Good speed and flow.

Great talk, good points, very knowledgeable

Great presentation for PHP developers. I liked the breadth of tools and actual examples. Good tools to measure code quality and give visibility that is difficult to show. Good recap and resources at the end.

Thanks for the feedback! This talk was in the Architecture track so it was intended to be applicable to any programming language or IT project. I will add some concrete examples of possible technical debt items for future presentations, good point. The personal financial debt references were intended to help relate to the impacts and solutions to technical debt. The discussion regarding technical tools and practices like continuous integration servers, unit testing, abstraction, interfaces, inheritance, static code analysis, and configuration management tools was intended to give direction on analyzing and addressing technical debt within a project. Thanks again for the feedback.

Good technical depth, very knowledgeable, allowed for questions, and handled slides issue very well. Explained how to address various database issues that are common.

Enjoyed the code samples and examples. Good enthusiasm and well presented. Good points on testing and how to introduce tests to spaghetti code.

Good introduction to phpspec and behat. Good pace and answers to questions. Only suggestion would be to spend more time on examples but overall great presentation.

Great advice on mentoring, wisdom, and how to become better as a developer. Good flow and pace.

Started off with some basics but then went on a good drive into standards and community. Really good to hear about Ben's experience with the community.

Excellent talk, great technical knowledge of subject and great insights.

Adam gave really good step by step instructions on how to refactor legacy code. He covered good coding practices and standards like auto-loading, dependency injection, and PSR suggestions. I've attended Adam's other refactoring talk and the focus for this talk was very different which was good. Adam's vast experience shows in this talk with helping refactor legacy code. I like the examples that were given and used to relate to the problems and situations.

Good depth into caching, both technical and concepts. Good scenarios and descriptions of each topic covered.

Presented well and excellent domain knowledge. Clearly described benefits of HTTP/2 and technical details on using HTTP/2. Great code comparisons for using HTTP/2. Excellent presentation.

Learned a lot about mental health for developers. Ed did a great job sharing his experiences and explaining why this topic is so important. Loved his survey comparisons between mental and physical health. Ed kept a good pace and had plenty of material to cover during the presentation. While he did run out of time he was able to make the important points that he needed to make. Well done!

Brave to do that large of a live demo but it went smooth (and you said you had slides just in case). Excellent details on how to profile and optimize sites. Good charts and details shown to make point.

Good thought provoking presentation on concepts and approaches for classical and mockist methods for testing. Lots of content for the time but will make me go back and evaluate my current software design.

Lots of pertinent examples were given to support rational for going with refactor over rebuild. I liked the personal experiences Eli shared. I was able to relate to the scenarios and understand the reasoning being discussed. There were a couple of experiences that had a little bit too much time spent on them explaining what happened instead of why it was relevant to the topic but overall very well done. Eli was animated and kept the attention of the audience well and spoke loud enough to hear without a microphone.

An excellent soft talk that helped discuss common problems developers run into. I loved the Q&A portion at the end to ask questions and have some good discussion. Eryn was good to not dwell too long on the stories and instead spent time explaining what she learned and how to handle those situations. Great talk with great talking points.

This was a very technical talk on varnish that covered a ton of details on varnish and included examples and use cases. Samantha showed her amazing understanding of varnish and did an excellent job presenting.

Sasha did a great job with enthusiasm and extensive knowledge of MySQL. His examples were relatable and I enjoyed his stories about situations where he used the tips to solve the problems. Great sense of humor and well presented.

Aaron showed extensive knowledge and understanding of cryptography and was well prepared. His presentation was smooth and informative and he gave good examples. He took time to explain concepts and critical points.

Ryan gave an excellent presentation and gave great points about security. He gave good examples, was clear in his points, and was well prepared. He gave useful solutions, was entertaining, and showed that he had experience and a good understanding of the concepts presented. Great presentation.

Great enthusiasm and discussion about current topics related to very pertinent technical issues we are dealing with today. Excellent keynote.

Samantha delivered her presentation very while. I have attended some previous talks by her and enjoy the technical details she presents. The code examples made good points and demonstrated the principles. I feel I learned good information about asynchronous programming and the discussion about the future of PHP was great.

John's presentation introduced a very interesting perspective on loops. While I probably won't completely do away with some loops, I will consider alternatives for cleaner and easier to read code. I like the PHP examples since I am a PHP dev. I liked the speed of the presentation and the thorough explanation of what alternatives are available. Overall a good presentation that actually made me consider my current coding architecture.

Mike gave a good presentation about logical fallacies and had many good examples. It was unfortunate that the presentation was hard to hear due to layout of the exhibit hall; the videos and speaker were hard to hear, but that wasn't Mike's fault. The videos gave good examples of some of the fallacies. I would have liked to have some relation to logical fallacies commonly seen by technologists, such as push back for increased security or pushing for management support. Overall the presentation was good and the presenter demonstrated great experience with the subject.

Jessica was well prepared and demonstrated deep experience with TDD and BDD. Presentation was well organized, hand-out was helpful, and examples were good. Well done!

As a new user group president, I found this presentation extremely helpful. I had a ton of my questions answered, from boosting attendance, finding sponsors, meetup ideas, and organization. John also spent time answering additional questions afterwards which was a huge bonus. The slides were clean and concise, the pace was great, John spoke clearly without rushing, and many helpful tips were given that I had never even considered or thought about. The talk abstract was accurate and the talk stayed focused on what I had hoped to hear. Excellent talk and highly recommended. Could you please post the slides or share a link? Thanks!

Emily did a good job walking through her experience with upgrading an existing application to include a better architecture. I liked the code examples that were included and the tools discussed.

Although I would have liked more audience engagement, I felt Heather's talk was informative and gave great examples that I, as a software engineer, could relate to. She gave good details, had a good pace, and highlighted pros and cons of each communication medium. Overall it was a great talk that I would recommend attending to improve how one communicates with others, especially when working on a technical team.

Ben gave good technical details on good and bad things when working with APIs. He covered the basics and built up from there, ensuring the audience understood what was covered. The pace was a little too fast, which led to the talk ending a bit early, but that gave time for asking questions and discussions at the tables about the talk. Good talk Ben!

Great examples of SQL and scenarios that I could relate to. Pace was good, Michael spoke clearly, and the slides were readable even though they included queries and output. Great presentation that covered basic query optimizations.

Great soft skills talk. I was able to easily relate to the personal experiences Adam shared. I found the stories applicable to the topic. Great life tips on being motivated and learning from past mistakes.

Great talk covering how OMSI grew to change the world. Ed was honest, explained why mental health is so important, and showed where resources are available. Great talk!

Vance did an excellent job presenting technical information about how Node works. His examples were thorough, the flow built up and was understandable. and he kept a good pace. He demonstrated potential pitfalls and gave good references to other support libraries. Great talk.

Adam did a great job giving an introduction to Jenkins and showing how it works. He gave good examples and even succeeded in doing live demos on using Jenkins to deploy and rollback. Good presentation.

Eli walked through past job experiences where he first learned about and then pushed for best practices. His stories were entertaining and insightful in what went well and what didn't. He addressed a difficult topic since best practices are pushed and generally always encouraged. He gave good justification for specific scenarios where some best practices may need to come later, and I thought the always should do list (source control, backups, and security) was an accurate list to never skip.

Pulled pork, beef brisket, chicken, and mac-n-cheese, what isn't there to love?

Great informative talk on using Gearman for job queues. Michael had good examples, gave technical coding examples, and covered tips, tricks, and pitfalls. Overall a great talk about a useful tool that can really help out.

Jessica was well prepared, gave great examples, and hit on a topic useful for every developer. Her talk was very well prepared, she moved on when she saw the code was hard to read, and was helpful answering questions after her talk. Well done!

I wasn't entirely sure what to expect going into this talk, but wanted to hear what Ben had to say about learning and using other tools and languages. He gave examples from his experience where other languages were useful to complete projects and gave pros and cons for incorporating other languages in projects. His live demo didn't start off great but he was able to pull it off and get the node demo working. I actually really liked seeing how he worked through a problem and resolved it because that is exactly one thing to figure out when using other languages. It would have been nice to see perhaps a comparison of other common languages and their strengths and weaknesses and when using them could be advantageous over php and javascript. That could extend out to a simple feature and how that may be implemented in a few different languages. Perhaps extending out into various databases like postgresql, mongo, and others would have been good too. Also the swearing was a little too much for a professional talk for me. I noticed there were quite a few slides that weren't covered so perhaps a change in the pace or the ordering to be able to cover all the highlights and points needed. Overall a good talk that I'd recommend giving again at user groups and conferences to help developers expand their skillset and branch out into other languages. Good talk!

Great workshop Liam! Covered tons of helpful and current information on securing systems. He had a good pace and kept things moving along and even had too much prepared (which is much better than not having enough). The slides were clean and easy to read, the setup was super simple to just ssh into the vms, and he had good tricks for locking down things quickly and effectively. I liked the tools covered as well to supplement configurations and settings.

Good talk by Sebastian covering PHP 7. Stats and charts were good, reasonings for upgrading to PHP 7 current were clear, and pace was just right.

Very good technical by Derick. It was great to see how PHP works internally for various language constructs.

While not quite what I was expecting (I thought it would be more technical), Samantha did a great job discussing how developers can make security better and improve the public good. The stories were great examples that highlighted important principles to apply to development and projects.

Good talk, I liked the real world examples of bad user interfaces which tied in with the objective very well.

Great talk by Davey on the history of PHP features, new things in PHP 7.1, and what is yet to come. I enjoyed the code examples to compare old from new. The Q&A at the end was also excellent and Davey answered questions thoroughly and with a deep understanding of the subjects. Great talk!

Great talk by Anna on APIs. The first third or so was a refresher on API basics, but then the rest went deeper into good tips and tricks that were applicable. The real world examples were also helpful to hear and learn from her vast experience. Great talk.

Good talk about the challenges of growing a project. Mitch was enthusiastic about the subject and gave good examples of how a project can grow and considerations that come along with growth. At times he spoke a little too fast, and I would have liked to have less focus on how the site and game worked and instead more on the challenges. Overall it was a good talk that was probably most interesting to Magic players but applicable to developers in general.

I liked the discussion about how we are standing on the shoulders of giants, a tribute to those who have helped us get to where we are today. In a professional talk, especially a keynote, Danese has a tremendous amount of experience, but the talk wondered a bit. I also felt it was in poor favor to use swear words during a talk, especially the f word during a keynote :(

Mac-n-cheese and chicken, what wasn't to love?

Was quite different from most talks in that it was focused on using Hack and their experiences migrating to it. I did learn a few things about Hack and some benefits, but with advancements made in PHP 7, having good unit tests, and recent discussions about future features in PHP it is hard to find good reasons to migrate. Overall a good keynote but not great.

Pizza, games, and good company. It was a fun night!

Other than the hamburger patties being smaller than the buns, it was a pretty good lunch. The cookies were tasty.

This was one of the most inspirational talks I've ever attended. I left feeling truly motivated and empowered to write tests for PHP source. The slides were technical and very helpful to show exactly how to do what talk description said would be learned. Sammy had superb delivery and enthusiasm. Amazing talk that I would highly recommend attending in the future.

It was really interesting to see exactly how to write PHP extensions. Derick was filling in for another speaker short notice and did an amazing job. I left knowing why and how to write extensions, including syntax and tests.

Great talk. I enjoyed learning about the history behind modern programming languages. It was fun to hear about those engineering pioneers. The tribute to the current community was great and motivating as well. Well done!

Pizza again, could have shaken that up a bit, but I loved the giant cookies. Fun games and good company again.

Joel had great enthusiasm and I learned a ton about machine learning. The examples were helpful and the talk had great flow and organization. Very good presentation.

Good talk, it was very entertaining to hear about John's hike. This was certainly a different than most talk, but it was nice to attend a talk that was from a different viewpoint. I like the correlations between hiking and software development, especially about being prepared, being willing to make adaptations and adjustments along the way, and using the resources you have.

Alena did a great job summing up the conference. It was a good topic to finish off on. Take what was learned throughout the conference and use it to push forward with continued learning and success. Great keynote.

Christian did a really good job covering obscure topics, giving helpful hints, and demonstrated a deep understanding of PHP. Highly recommended! I took the cert exam, hopefully I passed.

Live demos are always a risk. I liked the concepts and ideas presented and the examples of where and how PHP is being used. Zeev presented a great perspective on using PHP for good.

Matthew did a fantastic job presenting on middleware. He articulated his words, talked very clearly, demonstrated a deep understanding of middleware, and gave a good amount of technical examples. Overall an excellent presentation. Only suggestion would be to show a round-trip example to tie everything together.

Samantha is a master story teller and is very interesting to learn from. The examples demonstrated her point and were highly applicable. She is easy to relate to and speaks clearly. She talks on the quick side but it shows her enthusiasm for the topic. Great keynote to kick off the afternoon.

Adam demonstrates enthusiasm and understanding of security. While he finished his slides early, his Q&A time was just as interesting and informative. Great talk.

Christian did a great job covering the soon to be released OWASP top ten for 2017. I enjoyed hearing his thoughts on what items should be ranked differently. Presented well and made great points.

Great talk discussing how to solve problems with middleware. Matthew showed he has a deep understanding of middleware, and gave insights into the future of software development with middleware. Worthy keynote talk, well done.

I attended this talk not really knowing how to use PHP with IoT devices and left feeling confident I can go and make a smart connected device with my Raspberry Pis. Colin showed his experience and enthusiasm for building devices and gave clear and helpful technical details, including code examples. Great talk!

Brandon did very well on this presentation. He made good arguments, presented his idea, and taught from experience. Slides and flow were smooth and understandable. He identified common reasons projects fail and gave some hints to help projects succeed. I would suggest not using the term "guys" since it isn't inclusive and can make some attendees feel uncomfortable. Overall it was a good talk.

Great idea and good teamwork for the presentation Michael and David. The live demo went pretty smooth and showed why it is important to bake security in at all levels. Well done.

The first 10 or 15 minutes of the talk were really interesting and covered great material, but then the talk abruptly ended. I was hoping to see perhaps a live demo or a recording of the chatbots in action. I did learn while the talk was going in areas I haven't learned about in the past, but the talk was too short.

Great talk by Philippe on multi-factor authentication. He had enthusiasm and gave good examples of forms of authenticating. I would suggest spending less time talking about the why and more time about the how. I have always seen mfa broken out into 3 categories instead of 4, so that was an interesting take on breaking things apart a little further. Good talk with an engaging speaker and great Q and A at the end.

Colin gave an insightful presentation on CommonMark and covered lots of material that was new to me. It was great to see how to parse and customize markdown, and good resources were given. I really liked seeing code on the screen, which to me is more helpful than a dozen slides explaining it. Great presentation and great code examples.

Federico sounded like a great team player and gave some good examples of coming together as a team and some potential pitfalls. Most of the points were more geared towards project management instead of developers. The keynote should have gone a bit longer, and the overall theme didn't quite fit in as an ending keynote though, which is usually a celebration of the conference focus and a motivational send-off.

Gabriela did excellent on giving good technical information on MySQL 8. I came not knowing what was coming and left knowing new things coming. The examples were clear, the pace was good, and the answers to questions were helpful. Great talk.

Good talk that introduced important concepts and tools available for development. I would have liked to see more technical details on implementation to fill in the rest of the hour. The direction given was good though to help attendees know what is available and good practices. The lighting made the grey on black text a little hard to read.

Yum! The meat and desserts were excellent.

Great technical JavaScript talk that had lots of good examples and helpful slides. Talk moved pretty fast but covered many areas that helped me understand why JavaScript behaves the way it does. Very helpful talk.

Gary jumped right into tips and tricks and showed great tips. I liked his live demo and willingness to stop and answer questions. As a user of PhpStorm I learned several new shortcuts that I will be using.

Really good talk David! This talk was very insightful into using alternatives to loops. I liked the technical examples and simple examples on how to use the topics covered. Highly recommended and well presented.

Great talk with good points

Good talk with good things to consider in career planning.

Fun talk discussing some core concepts that often get overlooked. It was very interesting to learn how the CRAY-1 worked. Great enthusiasm, audience participation, and insights give. I highly recommend attending this talk if given again!

Entertaining keynote to finish off the conference. Andy kept the audience interested and had good humor. Talk went a bit long but content was good. I liked the forecasts for the tech giants and relating that to trends.

Yay I won a book :) Thank you organizers and volunteers for putting on a excellent conference. And thank you for the extra swag to hand out at my user group!

Rob did a great job explaining Expressive and showed lots of good code examples. Having used Expressive already, it was interesting to hear his perspective and explanation about Expressive and how it works and why. The coding activities were good. I would have liked to gone more into leveraging middleware through multiple layers and discussing the impact middleware has with MVC and architecture. Great tutorial.

Rob had many excellent code examples to teach how to use OAuth2. He had clean slides, a good presentation of the topic, had good flow, and referenced helpful libraries. Great talk that made understanding OAuth2 clear while also providing helpful examples.

Ann gave an excellent keynote on standing up for yourself, progressing your career, and handling hard topics. Her examples were highly relevant, slides were clean, pace was just right, and she motivated the audience. Well done!

Derick gave an excellent talk on xdebug, even through a fire alarm. He covered important information on setting up xdebug (which is half the battle), how to use it, profiling, code coverage, and other areas of xdebug that I didn't even know existed. Great technical talk with good code examples and screen shots. Great talk.

Derick gave an excellent deep dive into Xdebug. He covered the basic, showed live examples with PhpStorm, and introduced me to features I had not used yet. Great technical talk.

Alena gave a well-prepared talk with good supporting code examples and stepped through how scoping works in PHP. Coming into the talk I thought the talk was about project scope, but I should have read the abstract to verify. It was a good refresher talk and worth the time attending. Alena keeps the audience engaged, keeps a good pace, and demonstrates great knowledge and application.

Amanda gave a great talk that I could totally relate to. The style was relaxed, the examples were very pertinent, and the talk went smooth.

This was a great talk that helped me understand why inclusive design is important and made me reflect on projects. Great talk!

Kerri gave a good talk about asking questions and developing skills to understand the "why" better. Fun talk with personal stories.

Lisa had great enthusiasm and covered a variety of topics related to security. While the talk title wasn't the main focus, I still felt like the content was applicable and important to attendees. Good talk.

Federico has great presentation skills and has an easy-going personality. The idea of developers everywhere contributing to a global e-commerce goal sounds great, but doesn't apply to everyone and is a company goal instead of a community goal. I did not appreciate the non-workplace appropriate language that popped up a few times; a keynote talk isn't the place for that. Overall the audience was kept engaged, it was nice that it wasn't kept too long, but the objective was off. It was also hard to hear some of the questions and comments since the speaker didn't repeat them (as Nic mentioned).

David gave a really good uncon talk on automating the QA process. Good tools and examples were introduced and discussed, and the flow was excellent.

Great keynote by Jenny. Her research and findings were an excellent study on user groups. It was great to hear others having similar problems and also seeing the benefit from user groups. Very well prepared, organized, and presented.

Wim did a great job presenting on upgrading to PHP 7 and on PHPCompatibility. His talk was smooth, the topics covered were applicable, and the examples were helpful. I enjoyed the live demo. The blend of why to upgrade to PHP 7 coupled with how was an interesting perspective and added good value to the talk.

Lorna gave a great talk on webhooks. Her explanations were very clear, the examples pertinent, and her passion for the subject was great. Good presentation and well worth the time attending.

All hail king of the live demos! Michael did excellent working through his live demo, and it was good to see him solve problems that came up, making the demo have a real-world feel to it. Well done.

Gary gave great advice, kept the audience engaged, and was easy to relate to. Great keynote with an important message to remember.

PJ gave a good keynote and made great points on the benefits of a community and how to reach across barriers. He brings a different perspective with his background with other programming languages.

Hannes gave a very insightful talk on design patterns and architecture. The coding examples made the points very clear, and the patterns discussed will help me immediately make improvements to my coding. Ran short, but the content covered was excellent and gave a good direction without excess fillers. Great talk that I'd recommend for any intermediate to advanced level developer (not a beginner talk).