Grig and I got a lot of positive feedback on our tutorial presentation, and I have a few thoughts to offer.

First, I had a cynical thought on why so many people signed up for the testing tutorial. The situation could be analogous to that of Christmas: some Christians go to church only once a year, at Christmas, to save their souls. Likewise, perhaps many people were thinking that they would be relieved of the need to test by coming to our tutorial.

Of course, the more optimistic take on things is that many people realize they need to test but they don't have a good idea of how to do it...

Second, several people (ok, two ;) commented that our tutorial was more technical, more involved, and higher-level than many (any?) of the other tutorials (!?!). I find this hard to believe, but, if true, there may be a demand for "entree-to-nuts", or maybe "soup to salad", not just "soup-to-entree", tutorials. (Evelyn Mitchell alluded to this in conversation with me, too.)

Third, the same people also mentioned that our tutorial was more technical than many of the other talks at the conference. I agree, in the sense that we presented stuff directly useful to & relevant to programmers. I've seen a few other comments that PyCon '06 was lighter on language internals and developer tool talks than before. This may just be another sign that Python is growing out of its gangly developer-only phase, but I think it results in a narrower conference. A lot of Python luminaries showed up and slouched around for a few days without giving talks. It'd be great to e.g. give a few python-dev people 15 minutes to talk about whatever they feel like.

Fourth, demonstrations are universally well-received even when they don't work all that well ;). So if you have the option, don't give a static presentation...

In other news, Robert Brewer has promised me a 100% solution to testing threaded Web apps, no doubt inspired by his own recent travails. So I'll be looking for that -- and now I know what you look like, Mr. Brewer...

--titus

p.s. Yes, I hear there was negative feedback too, and I'm somewhat perversely looking forward to getting the tutorial comments so that we have some explicit statements from people who attended the tutorial.