Okay! I just read this entire thread to be caught up. I am a first time PyCon-goer (as my previous post states). Because I have nothing to compare this year's experience to, I'll give it to you as I saw it. None of this is intended as a rant, (except maybe the lightning talk section;)
Gripes ------ Numero Uno: The Lightning Talks. The best lightning talk I saw was the one where the guy's code didn't work and he couldn't believe it or simply move on with his presentation, it was hilarious but I felt bad for the guy. I have to be honest, I had heard GREAT things about the lightning talks and I went to the session expecting to hear something great, or at least feel the same sense of community I felt when discussing python in education (i'm a student) or its use in the industry. I went with a friend who also attended the conference from my school and sat down expectantly. I noticed the guy was trying to set up a powerproint (or OOo or whatever) presentation and I simply couldnt believe it. A powerpoint presentation? Pictures? text? preparation? That doesn't sound like lightning at all. It sounds like, "slow-tning" talks. Methodically prepared sales-pitch presentations on johnny q. coder's latest commercial triumph. I thought these talks were spur of the moment, community-delivered and off the cuff? In my opinion, i don't believe that lightning talks should include the option of using presentation software, maybe thats too restrictive, but it seems to me that we'd be treated to much more grassroots or user-given talks rather than sponsor-given ones. I could just be ranting. Number Two: Presenters should be required to post their slides on the web site / schedule before they are permitted to present. We want 'em, they've got 'em, and I was in more than one session where simply having uploaded them to the PyCon schedule would have saved the presenters bacon when it came time for their laptop to die or something else. I realize that these presentations are fluid and change (often the night before!) but a failsafe like this wouldn't hurt anyone. Number Three: Too much code, not enough concept. Presenters this one's for you. I can't count the number of presentations I attended where the presenter would click through three slides of pycode just to show us a two or three-line snippet that illustrated their point. Worse yet, it was often at the bottom of the screen so no one but the front row could see it. This goes for text two. I saw some great presentations as well, and they had limited text on each slide. The last thing your audience wants to see is a slide drenched in text of any kind. You only have 30 minutes (or less). Show us brief couplets of code for syntax sake. We don't care about code, we care about the concept. If it were an hour lecture you could go through pages of code and itd be great, but when we can't even read the whole slide before you move on then its too much. Number Four: What's a BOF? Noob here. My first pycon and I didnt know the terminology. Shocker huh? Heh, well i figured it out into the first day, but still didn't quite get the concept. Around day two or three i started attending these and learned just how cool they are. With the RAPID growth pycon has shown over the last few years, perhaps a little session at the beginning to help the newcomers or a "Terminology" page in the handbook would be helpful? Praise ------ As a student attending his first pycon, i must say it was AWESOME. Depending on the sessions i chose to attend, i learned all KINDS of useful stuff. Pyglet, Stackless (i'm willing to give it a chance despite the mediocre presentation), RE, pysight and more. Coming from a small school out west, the experience of visiting a convention where a community actually existed was an incredible experience. That was probably the best part of the conference was seeing that there truly was a programming community and meeting other like-minded people and being able to finally discuss things of programming importance with them. I guess thats what we had hoped to see more of in the lightning talks. We enjoyed the EXPO as well and a couple of our graduating attendees have nabbed phone interviews with companies that were represented there. I am definitely planning on returning to pycon next year, if only to rub shoulders with other python programmers again and *hopefully* attend a conference that has learned from any mistakes this year and become an even better event for 2009. adam -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
