When technical glitches hit

Scott Davis: Resiliency is something we always talk about in software. I think resiliency is something you have to strive for as an instructor or as a conference speaker.

It's not avoiding technical glitches that makes you a pro: it's the grace and humor you use in reacting to the glitches when they inevitably happen. I've had a number of people come up to me after a talk that went badly and say, "I'm sorry that you had trouble up there on stage, but I probably learned more from watching you debug it in real time than if everything had gone right in the first place."

Nowadays, I take a screenshot of every website that I'm going to mention in my presentation and put it in my slides with a hyperlink. If I'm at a conference with good Wi-Fi, then I can click on the screenshot and seamlessly scroll around the live website as I talk about it.

If, on the other hand, I end up in a hotel conference room in the basement with crummy Wi-Fi, then I just discuss the static screenshots in my slide deck. I never apologize for not having a live Internet connection—that's part of the theater experience. You silently adapt to the presence or absence of good bandwidth, and the audience never knows the difference.

I love to give live coding examples in my presentations, but I always have a working, finished copy of the example saved in a parallel directory. If I get stage-blind and can't find the bug while I'm live coding, I don't spin my wheels for too long. I say, "Okay, let me show you what I was trying to demonstrate here." I then pull up the working code and make some trivial edit, like changing "Denver" to "Frankfurt" or "Oslo" (wherever I happen to be at the time), which gives the illusion of live coding.

I might then take that working code and purposely insert a syntax error to illustrate a point: "See how easy it is to miss a semicolon here? Let's look at the error message so that when you find yourself in a similar situation back at the office, it won't be nearly as scary."

Geertjan Wielenga: What about the laptop-not-connecting-to-the-projector scenario? What then?

Scott Davis: Years ago, I did all of my presentations in PowerPoint. Later, I graduated to Keynote. PowerPoint was, for better or worse, the least common denominator. It was something you could assume would be available if your personal laptop wouldn't work with the audio/visual setup at the conference.

Sadly, most of my legacy presentations are now trapped in an outdated, proprietary nut that is harder to crack than you might think. Apple and Microsoft are far less concerned about backward compatibility and legacy support than I am, apparently.

What I've started doing now is writing all of my slides in HTML and posting them on the web. I call it "Talk-o-Vision." It's pure HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, with zero external dependencies. Just as every Jedi must build their own light saber, as a professional presenter, I take great pride in building my own slide decks from standards-based tech that should stand the test of time.

As a result, if I get into a conference situation where my laptop won't connect, I know that any device with a browser and an Internet connection will allow me to pull up my slides and proceed.

If the overhead projector isn't working, that's an entirely different kind of problem. You can laugh about it and offer to do an interpretive dance in lieu of your prepared slides!

Not having a projector is a more difficult challenge to overcome, but if your slides are publicly available on the web, everyone in the session could still potentially pull them up on their own device and you could proceed with the presentation.

Geertjan Wielenga: How do you deal with the whole area of jet lag, missed flights, and the typical problems of the world traveler?