Beazley was 'playing' the keyboard like an instrument. Every square inch of floor space had someone sitting or standing. The crowd was incredibly invested - nary an eye nor ear wavered. Even Guido looked on with a hawk eye.
I was in a small circle on the floor of people who had just smoked some amazing herb before the talk. I was hanging on his every word and every expression. I've rarely felt so engaged by a conference talk. I'll never forget this one.
He received a raucous standing ovation that is not evident from the conference video.
I asked a question at the end, and I was so giddy I had trouble getting it out. :-)
As a core contributor to an async framework, I felt that this talk gave me a lot more enthusiasm and confidence about my work which has lasted to this day. I think about it often. Definitely a track for the PyCon greatest hits album.
This is a thing at software conferences?
As I recall, he actually took the same conceptual problem and rewrote the solution in a handful of different concurrent styles.
And no, at least in this video I can not think faster than Dave Beazley can type. By the time I've just about figured out what nuance of concurrency he's showing off in his last example, he's already got his next example typed out!
Step 1. be David Beazley. He really is such an engaging speaker and I think his jokes and lightheartedness might make it look easy, but I don't think it is. Many probably think in their heads "I'll be just like David on stage" but they are not.
I have see nice demos where everything is setup and they just run a command it builds or launches a VM, that's fine. But building code from scratch, watching it compile, dealing with 1 off errors, or some hidden bug that now everyone is debugging, is usually painful to bear through.
However as far as presenters go, this guy is a bit of an outlier. He is also a teacher, he offers some python mastery classes in Chicago, so he is more practiced at explaining and working through example code.
Part of what made that talk compelling was that it took a concept that lots of people find complex/intimidating (how the internals of an asynchronous IO library work) and in ~30 minutes created a full working example in front of a live audience. Writing the code live in front of the audience helps to nail down the central theme of "this stuff isn't actually as scary as it looks".
There are certainly talks that would be better of just presenting snippets of code, but I think there's a time and a place for live coding examples as well.