Conferences and Tech Failures

I have been speaking at conferences for about ten years now. Internet failures are common at conferences, and I have seen presenters impacted by these failures. Before speaking at conferences, I have been attending them for many years.

Initially, local-first tools like PowerPoint and Keynotes were quite popular for creating presentation slides. Over the years, the trend of using cloud-based tools emerged. Also, some of these tools themselves have become cloud-based over the years.

Let me share the story of a conference arranged by a college with many speakers from well-known software development companies from the industry. I had reached the location the previous evening of the conference and had a chance to meet another speaker. We discussed our topics of presentation. Once I learned from him that his slides were on the cloud(he was using Google Slides), I suggested him to keep a local copy of his presentation. I was using Keynote (and still using it) and had a copy on my Google Drive - both in Keynote format and as a PDF file, in case my laptop fails.

On the day of the conference, it was a series of disasters. Many speakers had to wait for their slides to load, and some slides never showed up for the audience. The speaker I met the previous evening used his local copy of the slide deck and managed to deliver his talk without waiting for the slides to show up. One thing I failed to understand is - why these speakers couldn't download a copy of their presentations into their systems after seeing the failure of previous speakers!

Internet failures are not the only type of failures one will witness at the conferences. In another conference dedicated to the ecosystem from a cloud vendor, we witnessed a failure during the keynote. While the keynote speaker was talking about building resilient applications, the large display behind the speaker went off. He had to pause his presentation, and it took the AV team more than ten minutes to replace the cable connecting the display.

In another case, at the beginning of COVID times, a conference invited all its speakers to participate in a rehearsal which involved a demonstration of the newly built conference software they were using. It had the concept of backstage, where the speakers were expected to join about 10 minutes before their presentation. Once the previous speaker finishes his presentation, an admin will move the next speaker to the stage. Now, the audience will see the new speaker and his slides. On the day of the conference, I heard from the organisers that the new software is not working, and we are shifting to Zoom to deliver our presentations.

I have always preferred local-first tooling and have not yet found a reason to move to one of the cloud-based presentation tools. Our lifespan is not big enough to commit all the possible mistakes by ourselves and learn from them. That is why it becomes vital to learn from others' mistakes. Even in the conferences, the speakers need to keep in mind the importance of delivering value to the audience.