Algorithm, Review, Sorting

I didn't think anyone could get me to gain a basic understanding of sorting algorithms. Rowan did.

Good voice, good pacing. In contrast with what he told us, he seems to have a very complete grasp of how his stuff works.

Nice talk. Really enjoyed the dynamic visualizations. Wished they had a few more elements in the array though, to better show how the algorithm goes through it.

This talk was a great introduction to what goes on behind the scenes diring sorting and what sorting methodologies are out there. Rowan did a great job of explaining how each worked, and seeing code samples plus live sorting was very helpful. One thing that may be neat would be to have the live sorting display the code it was executing at each step so you could walk through the code and the live results at the same time. Admittedly, this would be tough to fit on a single slide.

I am always impressed by how well Rowan can take very dry and boring subjects and make them extremely entertaining. Kudos!

Great talk on a pretty dry topic.
He managed to keep it interesting throughout the talk.

Nice talk, perhaps not the most practical of topics, but computer science is awesome.

The live-code sorting aspect of it was nice, but only having 4 numbers made it perhaps limited as a visualisation for especially the quick sort.

Very well presented CS basics every developer should know. Entertaining and educational no matter what CS background one had.

Great talk,great speaker. Brought a "boring" concept live by an amusing style, well explained. Rowan's pace seemed slow at first, but for the harder algorithms it became clear the pace was excellent.

The way subject was presented was very good. Rowan is very good speaker. However somehow at the end I missed main message for this talk. If main idea was to remind everyone what IT studens learn in their first year, then thats fine. But other than that... dont know. Dont get me wrong - I liked this session, but I guess I was looking for something more detailed or complex...

Nice walk down memory lane. And every developer should be aware of such algorythms especially since they've been around like forever.
Perhaps next time other algorythms than sorting?

I am _jealous_ of Rowan's style of presentation (or are guys not allowed to say that about other guys?). His voice is clear, well-paced and he manages to make a abstract and dry topic exciting and interesting to listen to with his sense of humour.

Would like to see more Computer Science topics presented in this way.

Absolutely nothing to complain about the presenter, very calm and humorous presentation style and an interesting look into what's behind the functions we use daily, this is very important knowledge for decision making.

Not really what I expected because I'm not that CS minded ;-) Having stuff about indexing etc. would have been more interesting. But it was entertaining, so good job.

Very nice talk about a really boring subject. Rowan did a good job making this a fun and structured talk. Love to see more of him.

Maybe one of the least interesting subject to give a talk about, but the way it was brought made it worthwhile to listen to.

As a speaker you are still fantastic. The subject was great and the examples were really cool. The only thing I would remark, is that I think it's a disservice to the audience to present something you say you don't really understand. Maybe I misunderstood, because it certainly didn't seem like you don't understand heapsort, but I think it's a bit weird to say: "I'm going to present you with this information, a quarter of which works but don't ask me why". Maybe you could add a picture of the tree structure of a heap and show what happens when the heap has to be rebalanced?

I always enjoy listening to Rowan speak. This talk had sorting algorithms explained in a way that it was easy to follow, especially loved the visual feedback to see what actually happens rather than only the code. The added humour was also... hilarious :)

This made me want to go back to computer science classes, with Rowan as my teacher <3

It's usually really hard to give a good talk on such a dry subject, but Rowan made it look easy. Excellent talk.

Great talk, excellent visualizations and very well presented. For those of us without formal training, extremely interesting. I would've liked to see a better attempt at explaining heap sort but there's little to improve here.

Great talk on a more theoretical subject. Slides were perfectly done and made it more clear to the audience. More items in the arrays would have been very nice, or if you did several iterations for each sorting method (you only did for the first one).

Sometimes you were hard to understand/hear because you were not speaking loud enough and standing in the darkest corner of the room.

As others already said. Very well presented. The amount of information was just enough to fit it into the presentation. I really liked the live generated exmaples. Maybe next time you could use bigger lists for visualizing heap sort.

I was doubting to go to this talk thinking it would be a very difficult subject to digg into but boy I was glad I did go. Rowan really explained a good pace so everyone could keep up and left room for questions in between. The talk was very interesting and I got a good insight on the different sorting patterns presented.

This was one of the best talks of the conference for me.