Demos

Demos. Everyone loves a demo, I love a demo. They make talks fun and interactive, and a live demo gives that little thrill of “is this all about to go horribly wrong and leave me standing on stage looking silly?” I can’t resist the call of a good demo. But there are a few things to know.

Contrast, again. Green text on a black terminal doesn’t show well in bright conference rooms. If you’re doing demos, make your terminal high contrast, a black-on-white style, and make the fonts bigger than you’d use on your laptop. Big rooms and screens mean demos don’t show well at distance.

Check the Wi-Fi in advance. Make sure you know about what networking is available, and if there’s separate networks for speakers (in case the attendees overload the main conference wi-fi). The other option is 4G/5G but it’s hard to know if that’ll work inside a conference venue until you get there.

Record your demos. The way to stop things being catastrophic is to video every demo you’re going to do, and keep the video on the local machine.

Check the conference supports demos at all. Not every conference supports speakers using their own laptops. Hopefully if that’s the case they’ll have communicated it to you in advance, but don’t lose sight of it. If you can embed videos in the deck, it still allows for recorded demos, but does rule out live ones.

And if I’m giving advice to new speakers: don’t do live demos for your first talk. It’s a great way to have a bad time, and there’s lots of potential for problems.