“This feels more like a family picnic than a conference” – @snipeyhead #lsp14
— Daniel Cousineau (@dcousineau) April 26, 2014In an attempt to actually remember to do this after conferences, I'm sitting in DFW waiting for my airplane, and there is an hour to kill before we board. Since this was my first LonestarPHP conference I wanted to make sure that I gave at least some sort of retrospective for the weekend.
I had the pleasure of giving my "Your Inner Sysadmin" talk at LonestarPHP 2014. Overall the talk went well and was well received by the people I talked to (by the way, if you attended my talk and haven't done so yet, please rate it on Joind.in!). My talks are never the highlight of a conference though, there are usually way better things to go to.
First off, let me say that the organizers did an awesome job organizing and setting up this conference. Each slot was filled with great and interesting talks. The venue was perfect for the number of attendees and was in what I thought a great location. For quality of learning experience, I definately recommend PHP developers attend this conference.
As with every conference it also gave me a chance to catch up with old friends, as well as meet with new people. I had a great conversation with someone after my talk about deploying puppet and some ways of doing it. A big part of any conference for me is the hallway track, and LonestarPHP 2014 was no exception. I had many interesting conversations with people and picked up a few ideas for myself. I also got to finally meet @snipeyhead in person!
My only complaints, which are things the conference itself had no control over, was that the internet went out during the hackathon making it impossible to do any work since we couldn't download anything, and I didn't win the big giant red elephpant. I did another small red Chili, so that's at least something.
Overall my first experience at LonestarPHP was a great one. I will definitely look forward to attending next year.