Last week I found myself on stage at ContainerDays Hamburg, giving a talk I hadn’t exactly planned for. My colleague Xavier unfortunately had to drop out at short notice, and with just over a week to prepare, I stepped in alongside another team mate Antonia to deliver a joint talk on Kubernetes at the edge with KubeEdge.
The pitch: show how KubeEdge makes running workloads at the edge ’easy’, complete with a Raspberry Pi demo live on stage. The reality: demos are cruel. Despite endless rehearsals, the Pi decided to do its own thing when it mattered most.
That said, the experience was still great. The nerves the night before were very real, but once we took to the stage, they evaporated. The talk flowed, the crowd seemed to enjoy it, and it didn’t feel like the demo failure sank the message. If anything, the failure reinforced the point: running infra at the edge is messy, and live demos will betray you at least 50% of the time.
My key takeaways:
- Short notice doesn’t have to mean a train wreck of a talk - the time constraints forced focus (I tend to procrastinate when prepping for talks).
- Always assume the demo will fail. Make sure you build the story so it still works without it.
- Hamburg has a strong cloud-native crowd. The reception was great, even when the Pi wasn’t cooperating.
- This was good prep for (what was supposed to be) my first talk at Cloud Native Bergen in October (I’ll be talking about Cluster API this time).
Would I do it again? Absolutely. Next time, though, I’ll have a recording of the demo, just in case.
(I’ll update this post when the recording is available.)