Feedback
From Dev8D
Loved the Arduino workshops today! Has made me want to buy one, and experiment and use in very useful applications! Also, considering how good dev8D 2009 was, this year was far better, and look forward to hopefully attending next year!
Arduino workshop inspirational. My wife's a science teacher and not interested in computing at all, but think she'd love this as would the kids.
Loving the expert zone, its been a while since I've learnt so much in just 1 hour.
Edit: Favorite ES talk so far = Chuck Severance on teaching programming in schools 10/10 (A.Seminara)
Very interesting/useful event so far - despite being a non programmer! :) (A.Seminara)
I should have just made a 'build stuff' table, rather than try to run the construction challenges. Less work, more fun. Live and learn. Cgutteridge
I found dev8D awesome and very well organised: I've learnt a lot of stuff, met a lot of interesting people, and definitely got a lot out of it! I think there should be more events like these, this is fantastic! The expert zone was great to get an overview of what's going on. As to back such events politically, I would argue that mixing talented people together in such a fashion is definitely very good for the software industry in the UK! (pbelouin)
Blown away by the event. Saw and learned so any new things. Finished nothing but so many leads to follow up in the next weeks. Best bits: The clojure/data.gov.uk work we did, the 3D printer, arduino workshop.
The expert zone was a bit misplaced. There's no way I leave (or even remember to leave) a workshop / dojo / whatever to attend a 15min talks. Maybe next time have talks in parallel but not conflicting with other events?
The contests were also not interesting to me -- I am not "wasting" some hours to build and polish a project to win a £200 voucher if that mean missing those hours which are better spent talking, learning and sucking up information in general.
- I really enjoy doing quick hacks with new people, and I find it's a great way to teach & learn. I don't really care about the prize itself, but I intend to use the fact we won to promote ourselves and the event. Our school can list the exciting results from Dev8D as a news story. The bounties were a different approach, I think they worked far better than one huge prize we had last year. If anything, I'd make them smaller still, but have you win a £25 voucher just for doing something very basic, but with lots available. The problem with making it competitive is that people didn't want to tell each other what they were doing. I also really enjoy drive-by debugging when you just happen to be able to solve a problem for that chap coding next to you, that's really satisfying. Cgutteridge
I really enjoyed the event (especially the Lightning Talks). Dev8D is a great opportunity to meet new people and build cool software! I only have two criticisms: 1) The layout of the timetable hand-out was very confusing. 2) Do not open the doors for the canteen until ALL other events are finished (otherwise, the food will be gone when the rest of the delegates arrive).
Brilliant event. I even learned stuff about my university, from someone at my university at Dev8D too... I've done my review here.. http://bit.ly/db4I1D
A quick summing-up of my views on the event. More on the way: http://barrenfrozenwasteland.com/index.php?q=node/18
- Enjoyed lightning talks. Interesting subjects, reasonable duration (15 minutes).
- Interesting projects in Projects Zone.
- Bounties were good fun.
- Friendly organizers. Nice atmosphere from the outset.
- Got introduced to a whole bunch of technologies, projects, services, etc, three of which I plan to look into in more depth.
- Wifi too slow
- Didn't have time to work on bounties (too many other nice events to attend!). Could have done so if bounties were advertised before the event itself.
- Some projects required prior setup which could have been carried out before the event.
- Time for questions/discussion after the talks was limited.
- Program booklet contained two pages for each day which was a bit confusing. Listing all events by time (be it project, talk, meal, game, etc) would be better I think.
- Suggest preparing a notepad with the list of events and a space for each event to take notes on. Add a list of participants in the notepad too to make it easy to exchange contact details.
- Every hour was worth it.
Agdturner Feedback
- Hopefully, you can find my notes from the event including my feedback via the following URL:
- http://portal.ncess.ac.uk/access/wiki/site/%7Ea.g.d.turner%40leeds.ac.uk/dev8d%202010.html#f
- I have also duplicated it below and I think it chimes with other things I just read here:
- Positives
- I got on well and meeting people and making friends
- Well run by the event organisers
- Convenient location and venue
- The food as provided by Alan's team in the kitchens was first rate
- People were friendly and there was a lot of enthusiasm and expertise and knowledge shared
- I liked playing new games and having constructive things to play with
- Many of the expert talks were great
- The code lab I went to was good
- Negatives
- The wifi was inadequate although it did not fail
- I wanted to learn about Erlang, but there was no guru and coding sessions for this
- A fair amount of snoring in the shared lodge rooms
- It was good to have bounties and prizes, but
- Did this mean too much competition and concern about sharing ideas and not enough collaboration?
- There didn't seem to be a general/miscellaneous category which JISC might have put a bounty on
- Positives
Some suggestions for next year (before I forget them!):
- A local web cache, to avoid external software for workshops from being downloaded lots of time
- A local FTP server to easily share code/software/data during the event
- A list/map of wifi enable pubs/cafes - somewhere for people to gather and code in the evenings
- Ending the bounties earlier, with time to demo them at prizegiving - would have loved to see some of the entries in action!
- I enjoyed every single day
- I attended all workshops/talks/coding labs I could. It was a pity I could not go to the Ruby lab, it was at the same time than Amazon EC2, both very interesting
- Happy to attend the co-located Linked Data Meetup
- I met great people, great ideas, was one of the best things. Maybe it would be good to foster the interactions with people more
- Great event
