CFUnited was the first conference that I spoke at so I was eagerly awaiting the evaluations of my "Creating, Manipulating and Printing" session to see what other people thought. 

Fifty-six people returned evaluations, about half the room I believe, and fifty-five of them gave me a score.  CFUnited evaluations have four categories (Quality of materials presented, Knowledge of the topic, Amount of materials presented, Presenter's instructional ability) each ranked out of 5 for a total possible score of 20.  I got a 17.9 average which I am quite pleased with.

Some of the positive comments:

"smoothest flow of all the presentations"

"sequence of doc creation > review code > show result made the process very clean"

"very good succinct examples/code samples"

"simple real world examples"

"clear, organized, covered what was described"

"quick enough to allow for lots of questions"

"question time" 

I finished about 15 minutes early and used the extra time to show off one more example that was not in the slides and then had an extended question and answer time.  Lots of good questions and some that I could not answer but that others in the room could.

"everything" 

this person then gave me 17/20!

The negative comments/stuff to work on:

"presenter was a little monotone"

"needs humor" 

I would agree with both these comments.   I had not been sleeping well that week so was a little tired which resulted in a more monotone delivery.   I would like to bring more humor into my presentations but did not want to try and do too much the first time out.  Definitely something to work on for next time. Have you heard the one about the pdf file, text file and image?  No, well come to my next talk...


"more complex examples showing the advanced features"

"would like real world examples"

This session was in the bootcamp level so I did not want to go to advanced but perhaps this is something to add towards the end of the presentation.  As for real world examples I created a fake application (the Dundler-Mifflin proposal maker) to try and make the examples as life like as possible.  Others commented that they felt the examples where real world so this might just vary from person to person.

"the room temperature"
Most conferences have ridiculously cold rooms.  The rooms at CFUnited just seemed cold!

"a bit too fast"
Definitely something to take in mind for next time and especially when giving bootcamp sessions though others seemed to like it.

"please repeat questions for all to hear"
Yes.  Will do, I did for some questions but know I dropped the ball on others.

Overall I am quite happy with how it turned out and will be thinking of topics to apply to speak on at next years conferences.  Is there anything you would like to hear?