A few years ago, I was getting ready to deliver the demo for a keynote presentation at VSLive! in San Francisco.
I was demonstrating a pre-release version of Team Foundation Server (TFS). The particular build of TFS I was using had a very peculiar bug. If it sat running for a while, it would throw an exception and put itself in an inoperable state. After a few times, I got pretty smooth at resetting TFS; I figured I could do it in about a minute.
Anyway, on the day of the keynote, I set up my machine, warmed it up, and then sat backstage, waiting. Based on the presentation slide deck, my demo was pretty early on, so I thought I would be able to avoid the bug.
As it turned out, the start of the presentation was delayed a bit, and the introductory speaker ran a little bit long. When I was called up to do the demo, it had been just over 1/2 hour; as I performed the first step of the demo, I could tell that TFS was hosed. That's not a great feeling.
Luckily, a colleague of mine shared a joke the other day, and it came to mind. The joke starts with:
"What do NASCAR and technical demos have in common?"
After some furious fiddling with TFS, I delivered the punchline:
"People never talk about the speed, the power, or even who won. They just talk about the crashes they saw."
The audience that day was particularly charitable, so I got a good chuckle out of the crowd. That bought me enough time to get TFS up and running and continue with my demo.
The two lessons I learned that day were:
- When you prepare your demo machine, let it sit for a while and see if anything goes wrong. Software, particularly pre-release software, has a funny way of going bad when you let it sit.
- Keep a joke or two handy; you never know when you'll need one.