He definitely got the most thunderous applause of the day at DevDays simply because so much of the day's talks thus far had been horrible. I was following the Twitter feed of the conference and after his talk many people remarked that he had basically saved DevDays Toronto from being a failure.
I was hoping Joel would send around a URL for feedback. I didn't stick around to see if that ended up happening. The problem wasn't that the talks were horrible in and of themselves. But it appears that he totally underestimated some of the audience's abilities. I couldn't have been the only person there that's used ASP.NET MVC, Python, jQuery, and Ruby. For us, the talks weren't insightful because they were all introductory.
That said, I chatted with some attendees who thought the talks were great because they only program in ASP.NET (old style) and have never been exposed to these sort of languages. I guess they're the developers that ask the questions on StackOverflow and people like us are the ones answering the questions? :-) Or maybe I was just unlucky enough to know about the languages they decided to focus on. Had there been an introductory talk on Haskell or Clojure, I'd have learned something new.
