djj (9/30/2016)
Greg Edwards-268690 (9/29/2016)
Make sure any demos are setup and work. Especially if you need some resources not on your machine.Setting them up in several stages, where you can avoid typing and pick out the key points usually works well.
It also gives you a way to move on in case of a mishap.
Last thing you want to be doing is having the audience help you fix a typo.
Went to a talk by Grant and he takes a backup laptop.
That might have been a joke or it wasn't me. I'm WAY too lazy to carry around a backup laptop.
However, I do all my demos against AdventureWorks (and moving towards WideWorldImporters, or, as I call it, World War I, WWI) and my scripts and presentations are all backed up online. I could pick up any machine or vm that has SQL Server installed and use that to do my presentation. In fact, I had laptop problems at Summit and was forced to do my presentation using a borrowed laptop and a VM running on Azure to do the demos. It was a little slower, but it worked.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
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