Ladies and gentlemen I speak to you as a convert…NO….an oracle of the gods. Forget about the football gods, those are just wimps, the ones you should be scared of are the demo gods. When you are preparing for a demo you must appease them or their wrath will be swift for their hand is unwavering and their vengeance knows no equal. They will make you appear a fool in front of investors, your boss, fellow students, potential customers…need I go on?.

Am I being paranoid? I don’t blame you for thinking that, I was like you once, full of vigour and careless abandon with no regard for the gods until fate or what Roland of Gilead would call ka, made me have encounter with the demo gods. It was a day like any other, the sun was out and birds sung of cares or joys I know not of and my product was working fine last evening and it would do the same this morning….or so I thought. To my embarrassment and delight of the demo gods it was a catastrophic demo which was only dampened with my smooth promises of a future product built with code from the very codebase that designed the heavens.

To prove my point here is Bill Gates famously incurring the wrath of the demo gods at the launch of Windows 98….

Who are these gods you ask?

O ye weary coder, I have peered into the abyss and caught a glimpse of evil most foul, a face that is and yet is not, no they are not shinigami they are much worse. The demo gods are almost a deification of Murphy’s Law

O ye infidel, do not despair all hope is not lost….yet. Perform these ritual to appease them or even cause them to smile fortune on your demo.

• Do not modify your code at least three days prior to your demo (unless of course its bug fixes) because the gods will smite thine changes to cause maximum embarrassment. The gods have smitten me many times for non-compliance.
• Test your code early on the platform to be used for the demo
• Print the stuff you need early because the demo gods use printers too…or maybe printers are the incarnation of the every evil that pandora let out when she opened her box. Just don’t trust printers.
• Have backups of your slides, your code and hardware…the gods can be thwarted if you keep them guessing
• Arrive early and setup you environment, nope the holy water is not necessary newbie…this is not an exorcism save that for any bugs
• Keep it simple. The demo gods delight in the overly complex and love to wreak havoc when indulged.
• Rehearse your demo as though it were a play written by Britney Spears….or was it Shakespeare, one of them will just have to do.

So what is the conclusion to the entire matter? Preparation is key in thwarting the attempts of the demo gods at messing up your demo..and NO you still can’t use that holy water now.

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