My DrupalCon Europe 2020 session feedback
94% of attendees gave my session a 5 star (79%) or 4 star (15%) rating.
Back in December I gave a talk on using Tailwind with Drupal, and why, for me, it makes sense in an agency environment where long-running projects are worked on by large(ish) teams. You can watch the talk now on YouTube, if you’re interested:
Utility-first CSS is a topic that can really work people up, and two nights before the talk a Twitter thread of hot-takes about how Tailwind is either for those who don’t know how to use CSS properly, or for those who don’t care about web standards erupted and got me feeling pretty dispirited. I love Tailwind, I produce high-quality work with it, and it is one of those tools (like Vue or Alpine.js) that has made my working life more enjoyable, but it was hard to get excited about giving a talk on a topic that people seemed to have such a knee-jerk negative reaction to (often without experience of using a utility-first approach).
However, I perked up the next day (Twitter dev drama always finds something else to move onto), and the talk ending up going really well, with a friendly crowd who asked some good questions.
I got some feedback back from after the session too which was super encouraging. I’m going to post it here, partly to archive it, partly in the hope that at one point a future conference session selection panel may see it, and partly out of pride 😊
This was my first virtual talk, and it went surprisingly well. I made an improvised lectern so I could present standing up rather than sitting down, as I thought this would let me be a bit more animated. I wish I’d made eye-contact with the camera more, similar to how I’d make eye contact with the audience when speaking IRL– but it’s such an alien feeling giving a talk to a webcam! I felt good after the session, but I didn’t have quite the same rush as I did after my DrupalCon Amsterdam talk on Vue and progressive decoupling the year before.
Overall, how would you rate this session?
(This section rather abuses Emojis to represent session numbers. If you’re a screen reader user you may want to skip to the next heading to avoid having a lot of emojis announced! The takeaway is that 57 people gave my session an overall rating of five out of five, and 11 gave me four out of five. Four people gave me three or less out of five.)
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: 57 people
👨💻🙋♀️👩🔬👨🔬👩💻👨💻🙍♀️👩💻👩💼👨💻👩💼👨💻👨💼🙍♀️🙍♀️👩💻👩💻🙋♂️🙋♀️🙎♂️👨💼👨💼👩🔬🙋♀️👨💻👨💻👨🔬🙋♀️👨🔬🙋♀️👩💻🙍♀️🙋♂️👩🔬👨🔬👩💼👩🔬🙋♂️👨🔬🙎♂️🙎♂️👨🔬🙎♂️👨💼🙎♂️🙋♀️🙍♀️🙍♀️👨💼🙋♂️👩🔬👩💼🙋♂️👩💼👩💻👩💼👩🔬
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️: 11 people
👨💼🙋♂️👩💻🙋♀️🙋♀️🙋♂️👩💼🙍♀️🙍♀️🙋♀️👨💼
⭐️⭐️⭐️: 2 people
👨💻👩💻
⭐️⭐️: 1 people
🙎♂️
⭐️: 1 people
🙋♂️
How would you rate the speaker(s)’s mastery of this topic?
Poor: 0 people
Fair: 1 person
Good: 0 people
Very good: 9 people
Excellent: 54 people
How would you rate the speaker(s)’s presentation skills?
Poor: 0 people
Fair: 0 people
Good: 1 person
Very good: 15 people
Excellent: 48 people
How would you rate the speaker(s)’s slides and other session materials?
Poor: 0 people
Fair: 1 person
Good: 2 people
Very good: 12 people
Excellent: 50 people
What changes could the speaker(s) have made for you to give it a higher rating?
- “Examples of a implementation of the Tailwind CSS with PatternLab or a component based design system”
- “Show a few more real life examples of how it works in practice”
- “Show how to integrate with Drupal. Is there a module and what are the first steps?”
What did the speaker(s) do really well?
Slashes indicate groups of related feedback from different people.
- “Everything” / “Everything” / “Everything. The access to code samples and presentation was super useful, and the presentation was clear and anticipated questions/reservations people might have had with regards to Tailwind”
- “Clear explanations”
- “Clear, fairly concise and quickly ran through some very complex topics within utility first CSS”
- “Excellent slides with clear, easy to parse examples”
- “Explain the benefits of Tailwind” / “Explain how it works with good examples” / “Explaining” / “Explaining the benefits of Tailwind by using engineering principles”
- “Good information structure, easy to follow examples”
- “Good introduction to the topic/pros/cons”
- “Great content and really well presented!”
- “He gave really good examples, he was easy to understand”
- “I liked the examples and the general approach a lot”
- “Kept my attention really well”
- “Pace, structure, relevant real-life first-person examples”
- “Pacing, clarity, examples, answer concerns before even thinking about them”
- “Showing and comparing existing code with a better version and describing the differences”
- “Slides”
- “Well prepared, well structured, deep knowledge!”
