Tet's Journal: Demonstration syndrome

So today was the big sales pitch for the product I've been developing. We'd gone into one of our largest potential customers, a multi-billion pound company, and a big win for us if we can sign them up. The meeting started well. I had none of the expected problems getting the laptop working with the projector, and the presentation was pretty slick. Magicpoint rocks.

Then came the part where I had to demo the software. I'd taken a snapshot of my development code from when it was fairly stable, and copied it over to the laptop. I'd done a trial run in the office before we left, to make sure it all worked, and having satisfied myself that it did, I didn't touch anything, just in case it broke. Which, of course, it did, in the middle of my demonstration. Fortunately, just enough of it worked that they could see what it was meant to do, but I could really have done without it going wrong. It's fair to say I'm not exactly in my boss's good books right now...

Despite that, I think the pitch went well, considering the circumstances. We'll have to wait and see whether it materialises into a deal, but they seemed reasonably interested.

[OT]

[smittyoneeach]

I went to your personal site, and my cheese is Wensleydale, which is brilliant, but one is left with a question:
What name corresponds to Venezuelan Beaver Cheese? ;)

Re:

[Tet]

Sadly none of them. But even if it was on my list of cheeses, I wouldn't be able to tell you which name corresponded to it. I basically do an MD5 checksum of the name, with some minor additional tweaks, and use that as an offset into an array to determine which cheese you are. Try as I might, I can't yet reverse an MD5 string to get a valid input...

Not so bad ..

[tqft]

Could have been worse:
http://business.theage.com.au/condoms-the-latex-protection-for-mobiles/20080123-1nqs.html [theage.com.au]
"Crash tests boffinsAS COMMSEC debriefs in the wake of Black Tuesday, when its computer system crashed, staff are lamenting that a better day could have been chosen to trial its new computer interface."
Tuesday in australia as the share marker had a melt - COMMSEC is one of the biggest online brokerages in the country. At least the system has now been stress tested. Sorry about the link but it is

We call it the demo-effect.

[jawtheshark]

Everyone had to pass there at one point in his career. *sigh*

Re:

[Abm0raz]

I call them Thursday.

We've come to the point of writing smoke & mirrors demos for everything because they have less points of failure. It works surprisingly well.

-Ab

Re:

[jawtheshark]

Hmmm..... That reminds me of my Thesis defence. I knew the exact way to get through my program without crashing. Luckily they didn't ask an alternative way (or I could talk myself out of it...*grin*)

Re:

[Tet]

What's worse was that this was a smoke and mirrors demo. I'd hardcoded a whole bunch of stuff, rather than letting it do its own thing, just to make sure it worked. So where it normally goes off and fetches a list of events from the backend, I had it use a prefetched list that I knew showed the features I wanted to demonstrate, for example.

As it happens, I now know what went wrong. A few weeks ago, I ran into the limitations of my own homebrewed AJAX solution, and my boss was keen on me using the Yahoo Y