During the week, Barbie sent out the results from the feedback survey that he ran after YAPC Europe. The general results will be published later, but all of the speakers will have received an email containing the feedback from their talks. That feedback is private, but I’m happy to share mine with the world.

The feedback survey takes the form of five questions. People are asked to answer these questions with a rating from 1 to 10. The questions are:

Q1: Your prior knowledge of subject?

Q2: Speaker’s knowledge of subject?

Q3: Speaker’s presentation of subject?

Q4: Quality of presentation materials?

Q5: Overall presentation rating?

There is also an opportunity for people to write in more detailed comments if they want.

I gave two talks at the conference. A lightning talk called “Medium Perl” which introduced the idea of the Cultured Perl blog and a longer talk called “Error(s) Free Programming” which talked about Damian Conway’s module Lingua::EN::Inflexion.

Eight people gave feedback on “Medium Perl”.

Qu 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Avg Q1 1 1 – 2 1 2 – 1 – – 4.5 Q2 – – – – – – 1 1 1 5 9.25 Q3 – – – – – 1 1 1 – 5 8.875 Q4 – – – – – 1 1 1 – 5 8.875 Q5 – – – – – – 2 1 1 4 8.875

What aspects of the tutorial or presentation worked really well?

I always enjoyed Dave’s humor.

History and goal are clear

Excellent presentation, as you always do. Funny and surprising.

How could the tutorial or presentation be improved?

Make Medium use a readable font or have them stop forcing me to use serif fonts. As long as the articles are presented as they are, I won’t read them at all. Period. (let alone open the possibility that I would post any material myself)

I’m not really sure how I’m supposed to make Medium change their fonts. I suppose I could suggest that they make other fonts available as an option. But then, so could the person who made that comment.

Four people gave feedback on “Error(s) Free Programming”.

Qu 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Avg Q1 1 – – – – 1 – 1 1 – 4 Q2 – – – – – – – – 3 1 9.25 Q3 – – – – – – – – 2 2 9.5 Q4 – – – – – – – – 1 3 9.75 Q5 – – – – – – – – 2 2 9.5

What aspects of the tutorial or presentation worked really well?

Just about everything, an excellent presentation. Congrats.

Damianware!

How could the tutorial or presentation be improved?

I misunderstood the topic, and I thought it was a talk about programming without errors instead of how to solve localization of messages.

I can only suggest that the last people reads the talk description, not just the title in future.

I also got feedback about the “Modern Web Programming with Perl and Dancer” course that I ran before the conference. The feedback here is in a slightly different format as it’s a form that I made up myself. I got feedback from 11 people.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Avg On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you rate your Perl ability? – – – 1 1 2 2 3 1 1 7.09 On a scale of 1 to 10, how useful did you find the course? – – – 2 – – 1 6 1 1 7.45 On a scale of 1 to 10, how much did you enjoy the course? – – – – – 1 – 5 2 3 8.54 On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you rate the instructor’s knowledge of the subject? – – – – – 2 1 6 2 – 8.72 On a scale of 1 to 10, how well did the instructor teach the subject matter? – – – – – 1 2 2 4 2 8.36 On a scale of 1 to 10, please rate the amount of material covered 1 – – 1 3 1 1 2 – 2 6.27

That last question is always tricky. The form is clear that if you think it was just right, to score 5. But I always get some people choosing 10 and I think I’d know if people thought I was covering stuff far too quickly. That 1 is a bit of a worry though.

So, all in all, not bad scores. And generally people saying nice things. Which is always nice to see.

Now I need to start thinking about the London Perl Workshop.

Also published on Medium.