Less than a week to go until SQLSaturday Iceland now, it’s going to be a busy couple of months for me but am looking forward to it. I’ll get my slides and demos uploaded here at some point.

I’ve been debating whether or not to do demos live when I’m speaking. In the past I’ve everything live but certain presentations make that a little risky. I’ve done lightening talks where I’ve performed the demo then and there but that’s because I know that the risk of something going wrong is minimal. I’m working on a local instance of SQL and am not depending on anything else (e.g. – an internet connection).

It also depends on what the demo actually is, if it’s code based then running it live means that you can talk about the code but if the code is simple and the demo is more about the process, running it live really doesn’t add anything to the table.

For my session on containers, the demos will be videos. This is in part to reduce the risk of something going wrong but mainly it’s because the code is very simple, what’s happening when I’m running it is what I want to talk about. A video demo means that I don’t have to concentrate on typing the code (you really should never type in demos, copy & paste) and can talk about what’s happening.

Doing it this way will be beneficial as I can focus entirely on the audience and not be staring at my screen. I want to engage with the audience as much as possible and make the session as good as it can be.

Have a good week!