A full and engaging room at Techorama NL 2025

Yesterday at Techorama NL 2025, I had the pleasure of delivering my new session on Enhancing web application quality with Playwright.
The room was completely packed, and the energy throughout the session was fantastic.
I always enjoy these moments where we can share, learn, and interact together.
This one stood out for how engaged everyone was from start to finish.

Engaging the audience with polls

To better understand the audience’s background and experiences, I used the poll feature of EngageTime throughout the session.
Here are some of the poll results we discussed together.

Most attendees already had experience with end-to-end testing, with Playwright and Cypress leading the way.

When asked what matters most in UI tests, reliability came out on top.
A clear reminder that consistent results matter more than just speed.

The biggest challenges when setting up tests were flaky tests and time/complexity, which I can definitely relate to from my own experience.

And of course, many attendees have faced the pain of dealing with MFA or Microsoft 365 authentication during tests. One of the main topics I covered in the session.

All these insights helped tailor the flow of the talk, ensuring everyone could relate to the demos and examples.

Audience engagement highlights

As I used EngageTime to gather real-time feedback, the audience was actively participating throughout the session. The engagement stats were amazing.

• 71% overall engagement across polls and reactions.
• 47% of attendees reacted to the content.
• More than 300 total reactions were sent during the session!

Seeing reactions fly across the screen while sharing code and demos made the session feel truly interactive. Although I also learned that for larger rooms, using the stacking option for reactions works better than fly-ins. Just to avoid too much reactions on the screen at once, but it was a great test for EngageTime.

Demo Time makes technical talks smooth

I’ve done so many technical presentations now with Demo Time, but each time feels just as exciting. I’m so happy with how well it performed again.
Switching slides, running commands, and highlighting code works seamlessly. It’s incredible how much smoother presentations go when your tooling just works. Another benefit is that I can talk even more, as I don’t have to pause to switch windows or run commands manually.

Using EngageTime for better interaction

I also used the EngageTime Desktop app to display real-time reactions during the talk.
This helped keep the energy high and gave me a direct sense of how the audience was feeling.

One takeaway I’ll add as a best practice to the app:
👉 Fly-in emojis are great for small audiences, but with over 100 people, the screen quickly fills up.
For larger rooms, the stacking option works much better.
Lesson learned ✅

Session resources

If you’d like to explore the slides and demos from this session, you can find them all here:
📂 GitHub repository – presentation-web-quality-playwright

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This was one of my favorite sessions this year.
A huge thank you to everyone who attended, asked questions, and shared reactions.
Your engagement made it a memorable experience!