Michael Heap

Great talk - especially liked the idea of running a project out of a bug tracker and burndown charts. Plenty of questions for the bar later!

It's unfortunate that you commented anonymously as I'd love to chat and see what you would like to hear about RE: scalability issues. The ORM statement *was* over dramatic. I thought long and hard about including it, but it's such a polarising statement (and in my experience, it's true!) that I decided to keep it in. Either it made people think about how they're using them, or it validated those that have been burned in a similar way. I fully agree that ORM's are good in regards to not having to write your own mapping and data access layers, but that's not what the talk was about. When it comes to scaling your solution they're generally your biggest issue (or so I've found). For high volume systems, the performance/developer time tradeoff isn't worth it. I used an ORM for rapid development of our application, but it was the first thing that we pulled out when trying to increase performance. If you've developed a system that uses an ORM successfully to process millions of requests an hour (without caching) I'd love to hear about it, as I'm open to changing my mind about them. For now though, I stand by my statement that they're evil.

You can find an example playbook + Vagrantfile on Github: https://github.com/mheap/phpnw-ansible-playbooks

Thanks to everyone that's left a comment so far :) Alessandro: Thanks for the kind words. The tutorial is actually designed to be taught over 3-4 hours, so we did very well to cover it in two. Everything I covered can be found at the following link as a PDF: http://bit.ly/1ELr4Uy Vittore: This tutorial is actually designed as a group exercise. Sadly, as we only had two hours it was not possible for everyone to code along. If at all possible, that is my ideal way to run the tutorial. The PDF file can be found at http://bit.ly/1ELr4Uy

Thanks for the feedback all. You're right, the talk didn't really have an identity and was a little bit all over the place. If you're interested, I took a look at the session and wrote up the mistakes I made and how I can rectify them next time here - https://michaelheap.com/anatomy-of-a-bad-talk/ (It seems like I can't comment without a rating either. I'll give it the current average to keep things square)

Hey Lawrence, The talks are linked at the top of the page, or you can find them at https://speakerdeck.com/mheap/logging-your-new-best-friend

@Thijs - I agree that the abstract needs updating, sorry for misleading you. It turns out that most open source projects have excellent getting started guides, which makes delivering a talk on how to navigate open source projects much harder.

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I'm going to make improving my tone of voice and intonation a priority for this year :)

Copied from the FOSDEM feedback platform: Audience's existing knowledge 50.0 2 Topic importance 80.0 2 Content quality 100.0 2 Presentation quality 100.0 2 Audience involvement 100.0 2 "Good pace, nice examples, interesting suggestions and software, readable slides and easy to follow" "This is one of the most inspiring talks I've seen about PHP during all my years (close to 10 now) as a PHP-developer."