After giving a talk

Recently, I gave my first workshop at Eurucamp 2013 about building native iOS apps using RubyMotion.

It went pretty well, but there was one constructive feedback, from Mislav. Why am I writing about this? Because that feedback helped me realize something important.

The majority of audience have never touched RubyMotion before, so I’ve thought it’s a good idea to explain how it works, how do you translate ObjC methods into Ruby, etc.
After the whole talk, we’ve got the fundamentals done, but almost no GUI elements and something playable was on their phones.

The audience

What do they really want? They don’t want to learn about gunpowder ingredients and computer science fundamentals. They want a shotgun straight in their hands.

Probably a better idea was to pre-build a small app, and make them create buttons, interactions, store data,… They’d naturally pick up how to write an ObjC-style method with named parameters in Ruby, how to add a CocoaPod or a Gem inside the project.

Collecting feedback

When the talk was done, I’ve figured out I haven’t prepared a good way to collect the feedback; neither I knew for a simple software that does the job. It would be super-useful to get more feedback like this one.

Since we were on Eurucamp, it was time to hack something out. I needed only rating (1 - 5) and comments, where you’re free to type whatever.

After Talk is a simple app that’d let you collect feedback locally the next time you give a workshop. It looks something like this: