AmsterdamPHP December 2012 Meeting
19 Dec 2012 at WEBclusive

Great talk. I really enjoyed the topic and the way there was interaction with the audience. There was room to go a little outside of the topic scope but not too far. This created a nice atmosphere and really included the listener in the talk. I also really liked the code examples that showed the what's and why's.

As always great talk. Well delivered, well put together.

I'm pretty sure Yorick has a very decent understanding in what he was talking about but the talk just didn't cut it. To be honest it showed a lack of respect to the viewers. The talk seemed unprepared and unstructured. There was no clear beginning or ending. Examples in the talk didn't work, that's something that could have been avoided. If your talk requires resources, make sure you have them installed. The viewer doesn't want to be annoyed by watching somebody install dependencies. The talk ended in an awkward period of silence. Some people in the audience tried to make a conversation spring to live, though in my opinion unsuccessfully.

My advice would be:

- structure the talk, people will know what to expect and what to look forward to.
- prepare moments of interaction, once again, people will then expect it and have a question or feedback
- make sure you got your setup working, check it before you do the talk

This might sound as a quite harsh review, but frankly I didn't feel like I was taken serious. People take the time to listen, it's a speakers job to show they respect that by taking preparations, show the effort.

Kim,

I'm sorry about how you felt with the image. The lady in question is the "singer" Rebecca Black who became famous after "buying"her way into fame with a video clip produced specifically to make her look like something she is not, this is the parallel i make in the talk. I'll take note and make adjustments. In no way did I want to make any parallel to women in computing, I'm a active member of the community in helping out PHPWomen and currently mentor two women in coding and speaking.

Hi, I have no experience with ruby so my comment is the view of a first contact with the contents of your talk.
In the end of your talk I was fully convinced that you are a guru developer, very active in open source projects. However that is not the aim of a talk. The aim is pass on knowledge, and the way you do it must be adapted to the audience you have. In this talk you had a mix of ruby and php developers, so you must have figured not all were experienced with ruby.
These are the problems in your talk:
- You spoke too fast
- At some point you gave an example of php tools, which is good, so you didnt ignore the php ppl, but it was spoken too fast and just mumbling. There was no place where the name was written so I couldn't get it. This is why slides are used for.
- You spoke of the problem and than explained the solution, which is good. But you just spoke it. There should be a clear, short, message about the problem that stays there while you explain the solution. Or at least for some time, so ppl can digest the problem. This is why slides are used for.
- You gave real time and real life examples, which is great. However if ppl don't see your command line stuff clearly and have time to digest it, ppl get lost in the example. Again, there should be a clear explanation of the example, that stays for a while for ppl to digest it.
- Real time examples are great, but you always have the risk of things going wrong, and they did. First you didn't have some stuff installed, than something else happens, and so on. Its great that you make real time examples, but you have to make, at least one test run before the talk.
- Next time, if you plan real time examples, make sure your hosts have a chair for you so you can properly see whats in your screen.

I give 2 points because you definitely knew what you were talking about, you were available for all questions even if out of scope.

Keep it up, Im sure you will get better.

I think you probably figured this out from the talk, but anyway here it goes...
You have 2 things to make better in this talk:

1 - All examples should be PHP. Personally it doesn't make a difference to me, because I understand you want to teach the concept and the details are not the main issue. However, some ppl will only fully understand it if its a PHP example, and some ppl are just annoying and will complain its not PHP. To be a 5* talk you should make all examples PHP, thus avoiding both problems.

2 - The repaint(false) example. Fix it by making i.e. repaint('flower'). This way everyone will say "the method will repaint a flower in the screen" and you will say "it seems so, but looking further at the code, it will repaint the whole screen and animate a flower". From here you will immediately uncover and explain the 2 underlying problems (readability and breaking the single responsibility principle), and from there how to fix it.

Another overall thing you should improve is the talk mood lines. In your case, the jokes. Your jokes have a good purpose, are nice, and work. However I've watched 3 or 4 of your talks and they are always the same, which makes you sound fake. Get some more funny lines, funny stories, everyone likes a short funny story and Im sure you've had a lot of them as a developer. And anyway your Brazilian so you shouldn't have a problem finding fun stuff to say! ;)