Pycon disappointment

[Erich]

This is good advice: simple slides serve as organization cues, but
the content should come from the speaker. The worst case (only saw
this twice at this year's PyCon) is when there is a text-heavy slide
that the presenter simply reads. We can all read it ourselves! Your
job is to elaborate on the topic.

I'd like to see two things regarding slides: first, if at all
possible, set a limit on the percentage of the talk that can consist
of slides. I would much rather see the presenter show actual
demonstrations of what they're talking about than simply talking about
it. If that's not possible, then in the session description, clearly
state the % of the talk that will be slides. Perhaps there are people
who like to sit in a room and watch long PowerPoint (-type)
presentations, but I'm not one of them. Let's see some code! Let's see
stuff working (and sometimes crashing!), and how changes affect the
results. When I've presented at PyCon and other conferences, that's
the part that I spend the most time on: preparing demonstrations. It's
not easy to do; certainly much more difficult than creating a slide
that sums up what the demo does. But it makes for a much more
interesting session!

-- Ed Leafe

I'd like to see code listings made available to download where
appropriate. That way the slides dont have much hard to read content,
and we can look at the bits of code we find tricky as we see fit. And
if we get bored with bits, we can play with code!

Erich.

 

[atom.anderson]

I'd like to see code listings made available to download where
appropriate. That way the slides dont have much hard to read content,
and we can look at the bits of code we find tricky as we see fit. And
if we get bored with bits, we can play with code!

Erich.

agreed.

and just to clarify, i LIKE CODE! i hope we all do haha... but in a
presentation setting if they could teach/share with us what they've
been doing, allow us to download some example code (and tinker with
it) and remove all those details from the slides, itd be vastly
helpful.

I fully expect anyone who presented this time (who takes time to TRY
to improve) will improve.

-adam

 

[Aahz]

I'll step out and say that some of the non-vendor talks were quite
weak. The most severe was a talk on Stackless where the original
speaker was unable to be here and someone got up and clicked through
the slide deck at a very fast pace. I thought the person had stepped
in at the last minute, but later learned that he had volunteered with
a couple of weeks' notice. Additionally, the original speaker had
Andrew Dalke's *exact* slide deck from his Stackless talk last year.
One first-time attendee told me over lunch that he was going to
recommend to his employer that they not pay to send their programmers
to PyCon next year based on what he had seen in this year's talks. I
know that's an unpleasant message, but in the interest of preserving
PyCon's quality, I'm willing to be the jerk of a messenger.

The plural of anecdote is not data. I sympathize with what you're saying
to some extent, but any gathering of a thousand people will certainly
garner comments like this. Moreover, there will be some talks that screw
up because of short notice changes (and believe me, two weeks is short
notice).

Feedback is for the most part only interesting in the aggregate.

 

[Aahz]

This would be true, except that the two talks I proposed last year
were essentially denied because they were too advanced, so I didn't
even bother this year. Perhaps I should have, but the PERIOD needs to
at least be replaced by a COMMA as long as the talk-acceptance
committee continues to reject more advanced talk topics in favor of
HOWTOs and Introduction To Package X.

Feel free to join the Program Committee!

Seriously, this is exactly the kind of difficult problem I was talking
about when I said "it is YOUR FAULT". Speaking as someone who has been
on the program committee for most of the last few PyCons, it is extremely
difficult to balance all the conflicting expectations that attendees have
(particularly given that we have to guess, for the most part -- consider
that a thousand people compared to the six hundred at PyCon 2007 means
that much of the feedback from 2007 isn't particularly relevant). On top
of that, we have to pick and choose from whatever proposals are offered;
with very limited exceptions, we can't just solicit talks on topics, we
don't have enough volunteer labor.