Here's a quick tally of the top talks at last week's GOTO Aarhus conference. The rating is based on the red, green and yellow "exit-poll", computed as (#green - #red) / #total votes.
Make sure to evaluate the conference here and join the raffle for one of five signed copies of Martin Fowler's new book Domain Specific Languages.
Mario's technical talk on ASP.NET MVC went straight to the top. Two people made it onto the list twice: Tim Bray and Brian Goetz. Gregor Hohpe who stepped in for a cancellation with a talk on Near Field Communication made #2.
Mario Szpuszta: Fall in Love with ASP.NET MVC - Testable, Dynamic Web Applications with .NET
Gregor Hohpe: NFC - Not For Children?
John Hughes: Testing Asynchronous Behaviour
John Maloney: Scratch: Making Programming Easy and Fun
Dan North: From months to minutes - upping the stakes
Michael T. Nygard: Dev and Ops Cooperation when the Worst Happens
Tim Bray: Doing It Wrong
Kati Vilkki: Becoming Agile is HARD for a Large Organization
Mary Poppendieck: What is this thing called "Pull"?
Tim Bray: The Mobile Imperative
Brian Goetz: Java Future at Oracle
Jim Webber: Lessons Learned in Large HTTP-Centric Systems
Stuart Halloway: Clojure Protocols are not Interfaces!
Jez Humble: Continuous Delivery
Jonas Jacobi: HTML5 WebSockets
Brian Goetz: Data parallelism in Java
Bill Pugh: Defective Java: Mistakes that matter
Arjen Poutsma: Having fun with the RestTemplate
John Allspaw: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr
Dan Ingalls: Forty Years of Fun with Computers
Mind you, being #20 out of 84 talks is pretty good, and represents 83% approval.
Once again, we have talks from the so-called "vendor track" pop into the top talks; this. Jez Humble's and Arjen Poutsma's talks were very well received.
Personally, I'm sorry that I only made it to 5 of the talks on this list. With so much to choose from (and my various other obligations) it was hard to make it.
Over all distribution
The over all distribution of evaluations look like this, and I'm happy that 80 out of 84 talks total are above expectations. Great kudos to all the speakers and the program committee for making this happen!
As can be seen, four talks fell below expectations; and while that's obviously too many it gives us ideas for what to improve for next year's GOTO Aarhus. I think those bottom ones are one of two reasons: 1. misalignment of expectations, or 2. some speakers found it very difficult to present in the large room where it was difficult to interact with the audience.
And please don't ask who's at the bottom. I won't tell.
