I think this is going to be my last reflection post on OSCON. It’s getting late (remember, I wrote all of these back on Friday after the last session was over), and I’d like to spend some more time thinking down other paths before I call it a night.
The presentations this year were on the whole very good. Outside of the one tutorial I mentioned at the end of the last post, the baseline set by the presenters was a testament to O’Reilly’s ability to find good and engaging speakers, and help them prepare for their sessions.
Both Damian Conway and Paul Fenwick are masters of integrating their visuals with what they’re saying. The slides are independent but connected, with visual and speech each playing off the other, and the presentation wouldn’t be nearly as interesting (or hilarious) if the visuals weren’t present.
What’s important to note, though, is that it takes a tremendous amount of time to develop those slides and rehearse the timing such that you don’t even notice that they probably went through a couple hundred slides (including transitions) in 30-45 minutes. It helps to be able to give the same talk multiple times, but the up-front preparation is still the same.
In contrast, no fewer than three presenters (including one three-hour tutorial presenter) commented that they had written their slides in the last 12 hours. That’s not setting yourself up for a win.
They also knew their content. Some presenters had awkward silences as they were looking through their notes, reminding themselves of what they were supposed to say next. These two had their share of glitches, but they were much better at recovering from them.
Oh, speaking of glitches. The A/V company had some decent equipment for the sessions (not the keynotes — the quality there was pretty bad), but their wireless mics have a really nasty problem — they fail full-open, rather than silently. In other words, if the transmitter stops working due to a dead battery, the receiver decides that the appropriate thing to do is blast white noise as loud as possible. Sennheiser wireless mics, on the other hand, as well as the mics of any other manufacturer with any sense, fail silently — they send a known signal along with the audio transmission, and if that signal disappears, it mutes the channel. Fortunately, I was hanging out near the front, outside the path of the speakers, so I didn’t experience that pain like most of the rest of the room did.
Also on the topic of glitches. This seems pretty basic, but you should really know how to use your presentation software before you walk into the room to give your presentation. That fellow was really nice about it and appreciative when I showed him how to use Keynote, but it does show a certain lack of preparation and professionalism. Maybe he had already been rescued from another disaster by having his presentation imported into Keynote from some other software that stopped working at the last minute. Dunno.
Slide transitions were well done throughout the conference, which was nice. There were very few animated transitions, and they were usually an integral part of the presentation. One person used fades. The rest just used straight cuts, which is the right thing to do. That was pleasant.
They were also very good on the whole about font size. I did make a point of sitting near the front (whenever I didn’t, a very large person would invariably sit directly in front of me and do a lot of fidgeting throughout the talk), but it rarely struck me that people in the back wouldn’t be able to read the text.
Most people also didn’t read their slides. That was really nice. I’m trying a demo of a popular Software-as-a-Service CRM package that prides itself on its “No Software” mantra (meaning no software that needs to be installed), and their tutorials are mind-numbingly boring. Not only do they read all of their slides word for word, they also read the titles out loud, and talk at a rate of about 30 words per minute.
So, here at OSCON, even the weaker presentations were pretty good, at least for those that I attended. The only real challenge (outside of that one bad tutorial) were the occasional language comprehensibility issue, since the conference draws from all over the world. Oh, and one speaker let his session get hijacked by someone in the audience, which was also noticed by at least two other people who mentioned it in blog posts after the fact. That was unfortunate. But, on the whole, quite pleasant.
And with that, I’ll wrap up my reflections on OSCON, and go back to thinking about how best to run and grow my business.
If you like programming in a non-Windows-centric environment, I can’t recommend it enough. (It’s probably of less interest to someone who spends most of their time in .NET or C++, unless you’re also drawn to open source.) If programming is your day-job, particularly if you use a scripting language like Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby, talk your boss into sending you here — the productivity boost that it will give you will be well worth the company’s investment, even in the short term.
