Praise for Relevance Instructors

Jacob Lauemøller at RailsConf Europe

Justin Gehtland’s star performance stands out as by far the most engaging and entertaining. Note to O’reilly: next year, give Justin two time slots.
Jess Martin at Raleigh.rb

Great job by Jason presenting some compelling thoughts on test coverage and testing strategies.
Yatin Tawde at Agile RTP

Great presentation on some fundamental principles that even experienced developers take for granted and overlook at times.
Will Gwaltney at an onsite Java course

The Advanced Java class was great. Scott Davis gave us a comprehensive overview of all the new features added to java, hitting both the good and the bad points for each feature. By the time the class was over we knew how the features worked, when to use them, and more importantly when not to use them. The course pacing was great, and the labs were illuminating without being overly-complex. Highly recommended.
Jerry Haden at an onsite Java course

This was undoubtedly the best programming class I have ever attended. The content was the perfect mix of lecture, program demos, and programming labs. Scott is a very dynamic speaker, was clearly knowledgeable about the topic, and made absorbing the 3 days of content an easy and enjoyable task. I immediately began applying what I learned there in my development activities as soon as the class ended.
Glen Smith at The Groovy/Grails Experience

Try to avoid having your session at the same time as Jason Rudolph. Any session that Jason was involved with was packed to the rafters. I missed the end of his talk on Refactotum, but still came away heavily impacted by his dedication to testing and software craftsmanship. Some software quality guys make you feel ashamed when you drop the ball on code quality, but guys like Jason just make you feel inspired to take things to the next level.
A student at an onsite Rails course

Venkat kept our interest. Explanations of tech details were easily understood. Always had good answers to questions. Best instructor I’ve ever had in one of these courses.
A student at an onsite Rails course

Venkat’s knowledge of material was impressive. He also anticipated many of my questions and answered them before I could even ask! I went from knowing nothing about Ruby and Rails to feeling like I could start a new project using it. Great Course! Venkat was fantastic!
A student at an onsite Rails course

Venkat was extremely good at mixing in useful tips as he did his teaching/on-the-fly coding. Having such a dynamic approach to the course material let us get insight into common ROR problems + troubleshooting. Venkat was very good at communicating his real world experience and immense knowledge.
A student at an onsite Rails course

The taking you through code and at the moment debugging and troubleshooting was much more beneficial than looking at tons of powerpoint slides. Tons of helpful information and great examples.
A student at an onsite Rails course

Venkat is very personable, professional, and thorough in his explanations. His examples and class/lab structure are the best way to presenting this material … This is hands-down the best course I have ever taken in my professional and past colligate career.
Dean Wampler at RailsConf

I’ll finish with a comment on the excellent MetaRails talk by Stuart Halloway, with an assist from his Relevance partner, Justin Gehtland. Stuart discussed some interesting uses of metaprogramming within the Rails core that make Rails the amazing environment that it is.
Ugo Cei at OSCON

Stu is a captivating speaker. Brilliant tutorial. I’ve marked his talk about Streamlined on my calendar. That’s one presentation you don’t want to miss if you’re using Rails.
Nate Schutta at No Fluff, Just Stuff

After that, I sat in on Justin Gehtland’s talk on JavaScript. I have to admit, I was quite interested to see Justin in person. You see on Day 1, I spent my entire afternoon in the break out room next to his and all I have to say is, the man is passionate! A couple of times I swear he was channeling Emeril (BAM!) and I even detected a couple of Jim Cramer-esque BOOYAs… Needless to say, I was not disappointed. If you ever have a chance to see Justin live (like, say, RailsConf), do not hesitate.
JR Boyens at Java In Action

I really must commend Justin on an excellent presentation… I would purchase and download this presentation even though I watched it live … I loved that he really seemed excited about the topic that he was presenting. The energy and enthusiasm he exuded really permeated the room and energized everyone. A three-hour session can get very long if the presenter doesn’t have the drive and the ability to keep the room going. Justin’s session was the only one that I pulled out my laptop and was writing code in.
Vinny Carpetner at No Fluff, Just Stuff

At last year’s symposium, I attended every session by Stuart Halloway and he was just awesome.
Brian Rosenthal at Platinum Solutions

It was truly a pleasure hosting Stuart Halloway for a full day of Ajax training. Stuart’s style and delivery were perfect matches for Platinum Solutions’ staff, as was his obvious grasp of the subject matter. Stuart did not simply lecture to his audience, but engaged us fully with challenging problems and just the right amount of humor. I would definitely have him back for another visit!
Matt Raible at The Ajax Experience

There’s a number of presentations I’d like to attend during this time slot … However, Stuart Halloway is an excellent speaker and I’d rather hear him talk than learn something in another session
Jae Hess at The Pragmatic Ajax Studio

The knowledge of the instructors was bar none. They really showed us they know Ajax by providing real-world usage.
Seth Ladd at The Spring Experience

The first talk today from The Spring Experience was Justin Gehtland’s Spring, Mule, and the ESB. Justin thought it was going to be attended by only a few people, but instead the room was quite full … Justin’s style is quite good, and I can recommend you check him out if you happen to be at a conference with him.
Brennan Stehling at No Fluff, Just Stuff

Back to my favorite speaker for the weekend, we all sat in amazement at what we were watching. Stuart Halloway showed the difference between implicit and explicit class loading. I have had issues in the past where Websphere uses some funky class loading sequence to load common dependencies for many applications and now I think I will understand it the next time it comes up.
An attendee at an onsite Rails course

All of the content was good and well structured. A testament to that statement is the speed of the course was fairly fast and I never felt lost with any of the material that was covered.
An attendee at an onsite JavaScript course

Stuart’s presentational style was excellent—always clear, authoritative and good humoured. He was highly responsive to questions at all stages throughout class and illustrated his answers with relevant code examples.
Chris Richardson at Java In Action

On thursday, I went to Justin Gehtland’s Ajax: Learn How to Develop Next Generation Rich Web Applications (slides, demo code), Kito Mann’s Architecting JavaServer Faces Applications, Doug Clarke’s High Performance Persistence, and Chris Pearson’s Practical JMS. All of these talks were good but Justin’s talk on Ajax was excellent and made the whole trip worthwhile.
Christopher Judd at No Fluff, Just Stuff

I attended Stuart Halloway’s Class loading in Java: Building Dynamic Systems Without Pain. I expected this to be a boring discussion about classpath and classloaders since I consider myself extremely experienced in these areas. Instead, it was the best explanation of the Java classloading architecture I have ever heard.