Whisky Web Conference
12 - 14 Apr 2012 at The Hub

Tough talk to pull off in the late-afternoon slot, but I think Josh managed it. Explanation of the algorithms were clear, and showing the components in the real certificates was cool.

Loved this. It's easy to present ideals, cool new technology, and perfect code in a conference talk. What's much more valuable is to have a speaker (and even more, the company) prepared to open up and admit that yes, people write crappy code, it ends up in critical systems, and no, you can't just rewrite it all. I think the slides could be a bit improved though, the code examples were a little hard to follow in places.

Definitely very comfortable speaker and kept everyone awake after lunch, which was good. No point repeating what's already here, so what would have been cool is either a tighter presentation to get through all the points - or turn it into an actual debate, drop a whole bunch of the slides and just lead the discussion.

Accessible, straight-forward, and entertaining. The code examples worked and worked well. Showed off how simple it is to dive in and start experimenting, so thanks for the motivation.

Set the tone well for the day, following speakers kept referencing back to it which provided a nice thread through the talks. Hearing real life experience is great too, especially when it's not about how amazing the speaker is but how they're another human being too. That said, I felt like it could have been tighter and directed - I needed a bit more energy first thing in the morning. Minor point though, very enjoyable.

Sorry to hear that some of you found it light on content. Maybe it wasn't clear enough that the talk was supposed to merely inspire, as a keynote should, and not provide deep content. Curiously, when I gave it at another conference a few months ago (as a keynote as well), some people remarked that it had been too detailed and technical for a keynote :)

Regarding the media type versioning, I can assure you that what I presented is the one correct and widely accepted way of dealing with the problem. If someone says otherwise (e.g. by suggesting you should version through URLs or something like that), they are plainly wrong, which is unfortunately an altogether too common situation even these days where a lot of people claim to know REST when in fact they don't...

This was a good introduction to node but nothing I didn't already know from my own experiments with it. Still, it would be very churlish of me to hold this against the talk which was well delivered.

Enjoyed this, nothing majorly new to me but good to see it presented coherently with a real example.

Whilst there were parts of this talk I found informative and, as a whole, it gave me some ideas, I thought it started to wander a bit after a strong start. I think that some general design and implementation strategies to make better use of cloud services would have been better than the check box comparison of different cloud providers.

This is the first time I've seen Josh talk but he's obviously very experienced and has a really natural and engaging style.

The substance of the talk is probably something most people already know but it's definitely something that benefits from repetition, especially when it's as well presented as this.