One of the best things I've done was giving it a name thanks to Miguel's blog post. With a name, others can call me out for doing it ("did you just well-actually me?") and I can also call myself out ("sorry, that was a well-actually").

Let's be nice.

Maybe. Or, maybe like other engineers we care more about having things that work than your hurt feelings. In Inviting Disaster [1], Chiles talks about how the most successful engineering cultures don't cover up mistakes. They expose them and correct them at the earliest possible instance. This does sometimes require people to have a thick skin. It's not comfortable to realize that you're wrong. But, frankly, I'd much rather be correct than comfortable.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you should personally attack the person who's wrong. But, from the article, that's exactly what happened. Ms. Selle doesn't say that Mr. Katz personally attacked the presenter. She just said that he questioned the presenter's methods and approach. I think that's entirely valid. I see it at scientific conferences all the time.

I do agree that interrupting the presenter was uncalled for. Mr. Katz should have reserved his questions until the presenter was done speaking. But I don't think he was incorrect in asking the questions that he did.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Inviting-Disaster-Lessons-From-Technol...

EDIT: accidentally forgot link

What you're ignoring is that Katz could have timed his criticism better. Katz could have simply been polite and let the speaker finish the presentation and then do a point-by-point breakdown of what his issues were with the talk AFTER the presentation was done.

The audience in this case will still get the facts, so to speak.

I don't know what the motivation of the speaker was to give the talk, but usually these presentations are well intentioned. Sometimes people just pick a topic they don't know about, do some research and then present their findings, as a means of learning themselves. We don't know what the situation was here. In any case, just let them finish, and then correct them. Is that so hard?

The only reason I can find for the OP to explicitly call out Yehuda is so that maybe he'll actually read the article and consider the advice it contains. If the article's intent was to bring attention to this type of behavior, then mission accomplished.

I think the OP wishes she had taken a less passive approach to this when considering the sequence of events in retrospect. Sometimes, it's hard to be "in the moment", and only afterwards do you wish you said/did things differently.

Truthfully, I wish she had said something about this to Yehuda right at the meeting, but after it was all said and done and not in front of everyone. However, I don't know how he would have taken it. I could see the situation getting uglier at that point. Hopefully, he can/will learn from this for the future. No one is beyond criticism. We all have things we could be better at.

Even if the author was doing it to "make sure that he saw it so you could teach him a lesson", just saying "Last night at Philly.rb, a guy was giving a presentation on meta programming and he was rudely interrupted by another programmer. Lets talk about why this kind of behavior is bad" would have been enough. It would have been a good thing for all of us that have the same tendency to hear, and wycats could have seen it and said "oh, my bad, I can see how that wasn't very nice" without being called out infront of his peers.