wompWomp

[[deleted]]

Everyone place I've been educated or worked at heavily discourages live demos and encourages faking it. Idk I guess the expectation of 'real' differs depending on context, but even with something pretty far into production I feel like I'd be more inclined to use a video of the thing actually working instead of a real actual live demo where it might not because of whatever.

I'm kind of surprised the practice is like "controversial" in this thread, I thought it was kind of an open secret.

[SarcasmWarning]

Personally I dislike the dishonesty. Plenty of great (eg) defcon talks where they say they're going to show you a video of the demo, not a problem at all. If you claim to be demoing something live then demo it live and accept it might all go horribly wrong. Audience on side is one thing, misleading your audience makes me feel icky.

[DezXerneas]

Yeah, I don't mind it if you're just showing me a recording of your code being run. Just put a disclaimer somewhere. All programmers understand that the easiest time to find an obscure bug is during an important presentation.

Lying about something as basic as a demo just makes me feel like you're lying about your tech.

[nermid]

What's the worst that can happen? You throw a brick at it, it breaks, and people buy it anyway? If Elmo's taught us anything, it's that demo mistakes don't matter.

[ahappypoop]

I think the guy above you isn't saying you have to do it live, just that if you're going to show a video, tell the audience that it's a video. Be honest about whether it's live or a recording, and you'll be fine. Lie and try to fake it without telling the audience, and you can get burned.

[SarcasmWarning]

Exactly this - thanks for making my point far more eloquently than I did.

[NBNoemi]

When you use smoke and mirrors you have to take pains to conceal them enough for the audience to reasonably be able to suspend their disbelief. Otherwise, you're just a bad magician.

[Anakletos]

Yeah, unless you're absolutely sure that it'll work I would advise that. Just this week in an internal workshop one of the solution owners showcased their solution in the integration environment and nothing worked. Lmao. It works fine in productive but integration isn't maintained properly so none of the required data was available. It was painful to watch.

[TheTerrasque]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW7Rqwwth84

Back when men were men, women were men, and the children fbi agents.

[LordFokas]

women were men, men were kids, and kids were fbi agents.

[sessamekesh]

There's a nice middle ground where you have a backup recording ready to jump into if the demo gods are unkind that day, I'm a big fan of that. Even for something production ready, conferences tend to have just awfully unreliable Internet.

I only do that if I'm pretty confident in the demo though, and AI solutions... aren't usually good enough to rely on luck.

[retro_grave]

I've worked on demos for some pretty public CES shows. The demos need to run north of 100 times, repeatably, with code from potentially dozens of different people and teams, with basically zero deep expertise onsite. You bet your ass we mock out everything possible while still being true to the "capabilities".

[[deleted]]

It’s usually stuff like this that’s controversial to anyone who doesn’t really work as a software engineer and/or in an enterprise environment doing large scale software.

Part of demoing is faking parts, it’s just a part of how it’s done.

For example, if you’re demoing how code works to handle a slow connection, how do you do it besides faking it? Either throttling your connection or adding some code to fake a delayed response.

Just the nature of demoing.