Janet finally got the chance to compile everyone's feedback from the sessions earlier this week.
Here's my results:
Developing for Linux: 13 people showed up, 5 filled out feedback forms. Overall, people seemed to like it. One person was expecting to see RB running on Linux, but that wasn't really the focus for that topic.
My thoughts: I was a bit disappointed in this session. Not many people showed up (and the room was packed full in 2004!), and I felt like it was such a broad topic that I couldn't really focus on any one thing. I think this would have been a better Q&A session since people have such wildly different skill levels when it comes to Linux. Should I focus on how to use Linux? What Linux users expect? Pitfalls of developing for Linux? Best practices? Blah blah blah -- too much to cover, too little time.
Communicating with other Apps via Networking: 32 people showed up, 19 filled out feedback forms. It looks like I did a great job presenting (since no one gave me a "poor rating" on that), but that the overall session and content could have been better (2 or 3 did not meets, so that's about 10%!). A few people commented on how they wanted more examples.
My thoughts: This session had a decent turn-out, and I wish I had more time to cover what everyone wanted. The feedback ranged from (I kid you not) "Wanted more advanced infomation" to "Too low level of examples". It's the sort of topic that I could spend a month teaching people about and still be worried that I'm missing stuff. I'm guessing that (due to the turnout again this year) I'll be doing this session again next year. I'm thinking that I'm going to change it around a little bit and split it into two sessions: Beginning network programming in REALbasic (for learning how to network) and Advanced networking topics (for more of the theory, not too much into the examples).
Building Service and Console Apps: 28 people showed up, 17 filled out feedback forms. Holy moly, people seemed to like this one. Not a single person said I did poor. Again, people were looking for examples -- and sadly, I didn't have any to show. But most people seemed to like the content (even if they didn't see an immediate use for it)..
My thoughts: this topic is at least narrow enough that I could really do more hands-on stuff with it. The trouble is picking out the target audience. Service applications are so wildly different on the PC than they are the Mac that it'd be tough to do examples for one platform without having to do them for the other platform. I try to keep my talks as agnostic as possible though, especially since doing examples for both means twice the amount of time showing the same stuff. ;-) But it still may be possible to do (certainly with just regular console applications at least).
Here's my wishlist for topics I want to talk about next year:
- Networking -- beginner's and advanced sessions
- Developing applications for Windows
- Serial programming
I'd be a little scared to do the serial one, but I think it'd be a nice session to have. Scared mostly because the people who know serial programming have typically been doing it for so much longer than I have that I'd be scared to misinform people or screw up in other ways. :-P
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