How Not To Prepare For a Demo March 20
Well, it’s one of those weeks for me. I have about a half a gajillion things to do and one of them includes preparing for a presentation on Monday. I have had the presentation prepared for a few weeks now and I’ve even presented parts of it over the last month, but I haven’t done any part of the live demonstration yet. In fact, besides having a vague idea of what I want to show I haven’t really had any time to figure out exactly what the demo is going to be. Real professional of me, isn’t it?
I had put together what I thought was a solution for a common problem in converting forms to ADF. I had done most of it on a plane from Connecticut to Austin, TX a few weeks ago. I didn’t have a ton of time to test it before my laptop’s battery ran out, but it looked like it worked so I was counting on showing that solution during my presentation. Unfortunately, now, 3 weeks later, and mere days before the presentation I loaded it up again and tried it out and it doesn’t actually work like I had hoped.
So here I am trying to figure out what is wrong with it and get it working, hopefully before Friday so I can run through it on Friday with some of the folks in the office before doing it live on Monday.
It isn’t the usual way I like to prepare for these things. When doing product demos I have a machine dedicated to the demos that only gets updated when I know it works, especially since it frequently is used to show of “new” features that are in development, I like to make sure I have a script that works and that the environment is always the same. Too many other things can go wrong to leave any of it untested.
Well, at least if there’s something I’m good at, it’s being able to come through under pressure. Besides there’s always the flight to Georgia…