I went to a web services training class in San Francisco yesterday. It was sponsored by The Mind Electric, Droplets, and MEC. IBM allowed them to set it up at their offices at Market and Fremont.
Although I was impressed by TME’s GLUE and by Droplets’ eponymous software, a lot of things went wrong during the class. It was the first class they had put on together. Since IBM wasn’t really involved in giving the class, no one there was prepared to handle a couple major facilities issues that came up. The biggest problem (warm sodas weren’t exactly a show stopper) was that the room didn’t have an Internet connection. None of the training rooms on that floor had connections. It appeared IBM was still having the 25th floor built out, but that was still kind of surprising.
The CEO from MEC was pretty technical. However, the key part of his presentation was to be a demo of connecting to the web services interfaces at Google and Amazon (GLUE) and putting a responsive, lightweight client UI on top of it (Droplets). He ended up trying to demonstrate a trivial web service from his laptop. He eventually got things working, although we had to break for ten minutes while he worked through a problem. He clearly hadn’t planned for giving a locally hosted demo.
They all had made one of the key errors you should never make when giving a presentation or demo, especially away from your own office; they didn’t prepare for anything to go wrong. While you can’t reasonably prepare for everything that can go wrong, you should prepare for the most likely things to go wrong. If you have an external dependency like a network connection, you better have a backup plan. Even if IBM had a connection in that room, what if they had trouble getting an IP address from their DHCP server or what if the connection just happened to be down for that day (think SQL Slammer)?
I learned my lesson when I flew out to New Jersey to give a presentation. About two hours before the presentation was to start, I turned on my laptop. It wouldn’t boot. Later, I learned the hard drive was toast and would never boot again. I didn’t have the presentation on CD-R, CD-RW, floppy, or papyrus scroll. I had to call one of my colleagues (thanks, Keith!) back in California, tell him my network password, and get him to grab a couple-months-old backup and email it to one of the people where I was giving the presentation.
Anyway, GLUE and Droplets were pretty cool. I’ll definitely download their software and check it out.
Linky land: GLUE and Droplets – TME Chief Architect Graham Glass’s blog