AmsterdamPHP November 2012 Meeting
15 Nov 2012 at Tweakers

@Nuno Costa, i surely won't take it wrong, in fact i appreciate all feedback. It helps me to make my future talks better. Thanks for the response.

Please don't get me wrong, but I think what makes a presentation valuable are your experiences and lessons learned, otherwise it gives the same benefit than a web search

I know this was your first presentation and you where nervous, anyway I enjoyed the presentation and hope to see you speaking more often, after all, as a CakePHP developer, you have experience in topics not all of us are familiar with

REST is an excellent choice of talk due to its day-to-day use you can have from it.
The talk was good, a lot of good information was presented. And there is no doubt Marc master REST Api's and could earn his breed from it.

There are some points that could improve it, however:
- No bullet points. Using bullet points makes the crowd focus the attention on the slides, when it should be focussed on the presenter. This is something that is very common for beginners, including myself. As a reference, you could look up for Takahashi method (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takahashi_method).
- No checking the slides. Constantly looking at the slides should be avoided. Instead you should keep eye contact with crowd most of the times. This is something that helps them focus on you, rather than losing the interest.
- Keep the slides in sync with the notes. I use Keynote because is pretty perfect for this, you can configure it in a way that on your monitor you see the time, the next slide, the current slide with the notes. So you know at all times where you are and where you are going.

Good job!

Hey Marc,

This was a well knowledged talk! Very complete on the theory about REST
Try to use everyday examples to explain the theory though. It's very hard to remember what you have told, because it was so much.

Although I like the theoretic talks, most of the listeners want to see code examples. In this case you could add some more headers and raw body content to explain the theory a bit more using examples.

Keep on practicing

Good talk, lots of good information and knowledge.

If I may give a few tips on how to make it awesome:
- Improve the structure, talks should have a clear goal and a straight line to it, all presented topics should back up your goal, this is along the lines of the comment above (tell a story)
- Commit to your topic, you should believe in a way of doing things, does not mean you are right, but that is a speaker he is there telling you his point of view, people can disagree, but they are there to hear your point of view and make a decision, if you just give them more uncertainty they can't make better decisions.
- Relax and practice, this will help avoid the monotone, but also if you have a good structure the "hit points" will become clearer to you and will make it easier to emphasize them.

You did a good job and i think the reaction fo the crowd will help you realize the strong points and how to put them across in a more clear form. Thanks for sharing!

Thank you all for the kind words and the positive critics, both here and on twitter. I will take your advice to improve my public speaking skills.

NB im sorry, but i had to rate myself to be able to comment here

Yes, I liked the talk as well. It's an interesting subject. If I recall correctly Atlassian deprecated it's Jira SOAP API recently because they favor their REST API as well

I would have preferred a use case/example to wrap the story in. Maybe with some code samples. I think if you show how simple it is to use and how widespread implementations are that you can readily use, people understand the advantages.

The speed could have been a little faster (Some topics or sheets got a little too much attention like #34.) I would have liked this presentation in 30-40 mins.

You made some (intentionally) funny remarks and speak really relaxed and clear.

See you, Ray

It's obvious that Marc has a lot of experience with and knowledge about REST in the broadest sense. The topics he discussed is very "now" and sparked some awesome discussions. What I'd recommend is that he'd get more in touch with the art (because it's difficult) of talks.

As a listener you'd like to know where you are in the talk. Although for a speaker it can seem lame to refer back to the "index", the listener has a better sense of where you are in the process, making it easier to follow.

One of the more interesting topic for me was about "defining the resource url" (aka the /books/1234/comments vs. /comments?book=1234 part), which is something people can have a opinion about. This made it very exciting, because it related to everybody. I can imagine there to be more of those topics in this subject and would give them more time.

Definitely someone to look for at conferences.

Inte-rest-ing topic. If you felt the presentation was a bit abstract, INSERT your personal story. Use the car parts / automobile industry instead of isbn numbers of books for the code examples. It makes the story less abstract. Also: do you use this code for your business? Michiel

great talk, with in-depth coverage of the subject.

some positive criticism:
- practice this talk a few times with your colleagues, your parents in law to be comfortable speaking
- be careful not keeping a monotonous level while speaking

good job and looking forward seeing you at a conference in the future