There may well be an assumption that if you are a developer, you already made it to “Hello World!”

I agree, but I still think a few of the presenters could have been more mindful of the disparate backgrounds in the audience. It’s one thing to begin to tune out of the second half of a presentation because the assumed knowledge has crept up to expert level, but it’s another to not be able to catch up from the start because no context has been provided.

Like the way a movie trailer compares to an actual movie

I agree that the Lightning Talks were fantastic, and this is a good analogy.

The target audience is certainly at the geekier end of spectrum. They are the people that are themselves writing code. There may well be an assumption that if you are a developer, you already made it to “Hello World!” and basic tasks on your own.

So yes the talks tend to be “You already know $language, but maybe you don’t know $framework or $skill or $new_things”.

That said, I also think some of the titles got a little too cute, and it may well be worth asking for people to clean them up a little for next year.

The Lightning Talks get just keep getting better and better too, as people see the good and the bad of doing talks.

It also seems to be getting competative, as people try to outdo each other. That said, a lot of them are still put together on the day. (For example, my 2 World Domination talks that bookended the second day were still only written that day and partly the night before).

5 minutes lets you pack in the shiniest, funnier, and coolest bits, without worrying about actually having anyone in the audience learn anything :)

Like the way a movie trailer compares to an actual movie. :)

The talks that didn’t interest me much were ones that focussed on very specific areas with which I had no experience. This might be obvious, but I felt quite a number of talks excluded anyone who wasn’t already using that technology. It might sound unfair but unless I am an avid Python or MySQL user, a session describing the features in the latest release of the software is just going to alienate me. I concede that it is difficult to write a presentation/paper to appeal to groups of people who are new to the technology as well as experts, but I did attend these talks hoping they would spark my interest in the technologies, and would have appreciated more effort to appeal to a wider audience rather than rely on such an assumed knowledge (and assumed interest-level).

I also felt a bit let down with some of the more corporate presentations. The Oracle talk was titled “PHP Security: It’s Your Data” but was really nothing to do with PHP or data; it was just a list of the ways Oracle are trying to include support for PHP in their offerings, along with a lot of marketing and free CDs in a not-so-subtle attempt to win developers over.

As for topics that weren’t covered, I was kind of hoping to see more discussions on open source software out of the software development arena. Stuff like MythTV excites me; open source moving beyond the IT-savvy audience and into more mainstream applications such as home entertainment.

This is my own view of course, others may disagree.

…his cat has been injected with a microchip that opens his cat flap.

Wow… that is geeky! :)

Highlights for me were:
- Paul Fenwick’s excellent talks on presentations and small business - both were entertaining and informative.
- Jon Oxer’s automation madness - further info at http://jon.oxer.com.au/automation for those interested.
- Richard Jones’s introduction to game development using PyGame
- Nathan Bailey’s talks on best practice development and enterprise open source