We've probably hit the saturation point on cat photos. Cat photos typically show either a cute cat, or possibly a demented one, making some comments about you (such as how they're messing up their computer). Usually, the speech is at the level of a 3 year old. There's something humorous about the combination of all those aspects. So humorous that everyone now feels compelled to add it to their slides.
Overall, the talks were hit or miss. Ze Frank made a comment, which Dave Thomas echoed, about how people remember a good conversation, the connection made between those in the conversation, rather than the actual content of the conversation. Oddly enough, this observation can be applied to talks.
Talks generally are a bad way to communicate information. If you have a lot of information, no one will remember it. Adam Keys had a funny intro, but once he started code diving, it became difficult to follow. This is one of those situations that either requires you to revisit the code at a later point, or have an uncanny ability to read new code (which I assume most of us don't), or have an interactive session, where you can interrupt the presenter to ask questions. Sadly, watching someone dig through code can be exasperating, because it requires a degree of patience that just doesn't come across well in a presentation.
Despite this, I feel Keys actually had a pretty good presentation because it forced me to think about how I would go about reading code, and even reminded me to read code, from time to time. Even if I didn't follow what was going on, just watching him go through code is so much more valuable than having him tell me to go through code myself. As they say, show, don't tell.
Keys had a high degree of difficulty in his talk, so I have to give him props for pulling it off as well as he did.
Two other talks were pretty good, even as the degree of difficulty was somewhat less. David Verba's Practical Design for Developers takes its cues from a book (or essay?) by Jesse James Garrett called The Elements of User Experience. This is the kind of talk that doesn't try to do anything particularly challenging, but is so chock full of interesting ideas that seem obvious when you're told, but you realize isn't always that obvious when you go through it. Amy Hoy gave a similar talk, though hers was aimed at the interaction between designer and developer, so they didn't overlap.
Some presentations were awful. High on this list was Rails in Higher Education. This was bad in so many ways. There were two positive notes. First, the topic is kinda interesting, at least to me. Second, he wasn't a horrible speaker. But this was one of those talks which is almost content-free. There were talks that were kinda close to that, but still ended up being moderately effective.
First, he was a one man operation. The plus side of this is that it can be done with one person. He spent some time talking about IP (intellectual property). That's a concern, but how widespread is it? What about the actual educational software you're writing? Why are there no demos of it? How effective is this style of learning? Are you doing anything fancy like the big boys in Rails are doing? Does it matter?
Even with its problems, it had some redeeming points, though none of it Rails related. He complained about the quality of student programmers he was getting from the CS dept at Nebraska. Also, there was a complete disconnect between him and the department. Since I've been in academia, I understand this issue all too well. Academia often looks down on hyped technologies, preferring, their older knowledge. I think there are ways this talk could have been improved.
Sometimes just the lack of good speaking skills can hurt a presentation badly. Andrea O.K. Wright lacked much passion in her speaking, and the volume was too low. It's too bad that basic volume is so hard to get right, but if it's not done right, it can hurt a presentation. Evan Weaver had similar issues. It's clear he's a smart guy, but his slacker appearance, plus a bit of introversion, plus a lack of good focus in his talk made it meander all over the place. And this guy had plenty of cats. So you know things were tough!
Even so, I felt there was a core of some much better talk buried in there somewhere.
As I said before, the Twitter guys didn't say a whole lot. It felt like the slides were created in an hour. Even so, it had some level of effectiveness, even if they went for the usual cop-out--the Q&A session. One good point in their favor: they made short and sweet points, which wasn't the case with, say Evan's talk.
Then, there's a problem with the way these presentations work. It's hard to tell if any of these talks are going to be any good. Once you sit in, you realize, aww man, why did I sit in this talk at all?
Let me back up some. Railsconf is structured as a keynote, plus 3-4 sessions of 4-5 speakers speaking in separate rooms for 50 minutes each. There's a lunch break in between.
I have to think there must be other ways to organize a conference besides this usual way. BOFs begin to approximate the kind of interaction that you'd like to have. I don't have answers, but I feel like there could be something better.
And it might help if the full presentations were completely vetted before being accepted to at least try and improve them.
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