By this time in the series, hopefully, you have hosted at least one demonstration and made some small mistakes to learn from. Now, it is time to discuss preparing for a presentation. Given there are already four posts detailing other aspects of the…

No matter your experience level hosting software demonstrations it is likely you have experienced an unexpected behavior in the software while everyone is watching. Every live demonstration is susceptible to errors, and they are inescapable. So how…

This post will focus on a topic commonly used with smaller groups. I am going to talk through tactics to illicit audience participation during demonstrations. If you are a larger stage presenter experimenting with audience participation, please…

At this point, the stage is set for the most amazing software demonstration. We have taken a moment to introduce ourselves, introduce the contents of the demonstration, and choose a starting location that is common ground for all participants. All…

In this post, we will highlight the start of a software demonstration. Generally, this series will focus on three types of presentations: stage talks in a conference or meetup setting, single-instance presentations where the audience is much smaller…

Being part of a software development team, you will eventually present software to an audience. Up to this point in my career, I have participated as a presenter and spectator for hundreds of demonstrations of various sizes. Throughout these…

A friend and I recently started working on a little side project. It had been over a year since we last worked on anything together before starting this little adventure. The original idea for the project came from his wife and her love of reading…

It has been exactly one year since moving from a consulting role into a product team lead role. While the titles are effectively the same, the roles are drastically different. In this post, I am going to highlight some of the main differences I have…

Most Sunday nights, after the house is quiet I had fallen into the habit of attempting to get my brain back into work mode. Since beginning to write again, I have fallen out of this habit. My focus shifted to squeezing out as much relaxation and…

As you scroll through social media, there is a non-zero probability that you will come across some motivational content. Sharing the message of "just start". If you are anything like me, you find those posts wholly annoying. Everyone knows to make…

For any software team, there are many customers. Some customers are external to the organization. Some customers are internal, such as the leadership team, marketing, and sales. The list seems endless at times. As a team member, you share all the…

Engineers are always solving problems. Many of which are optimization problems. My problem to be solved? How can I continue blogging without investing more time at a keyboard? In order to understand the change, let's start with what my process had…