The demo that worked on the hotel Wi-Fi at 07:10 will fail at 10:40, in front of 400 people, for a reason you cannot spell yet.
This post is sample content for search, series, and cover cards. The advice is still real.
Record a fallback
If the talk depends on a cluster, a SaaS UI, or a live crawl, film the happy path the night before. The recording is not a failure. It is how you keep the story when DNS decides otherwise.
Make the laptop boring
- Airplane mode rehearsal, once.
- Fonts large enough to read from the back row.
- No notification banners. None.
- A local copy of the dataset, even if “the point” is the cloud.
Pair it with the talk page
On this theme, the talk page holds the slides (pdf:), the recording (youtube:), and the abstract. The blog post can then link to the talk template instead of pasting the same paragraph in two places.
See the fictional template Search that scales.