Tech bro day 6: Demo Day - week 1 done! 11 to go.

At Fractal Tech bootcamp, Saturdays are demo days. Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone in 2008 is the pinnacle of a demo.

While none of us are hitting that bar anytime soon, we’re getting the reps in weekly. This is a great part of the program, since your career depends way more on your communication skills than your technical skill level. People who can naturally market the value they bring, who are more extroverted and good at networking etc will pull ahead of the most elite leetcode monkey.

Our constraints: 1) 3 min 2) gets a reaction from the audience. We’re also recorded each week and get instant feedback on what we did well and what we can improve.

3 min is hard to hit! Most of us went at least a minute over. In addition to being laser focused, you have to keep peoples’ attention, which often drifts by 30-60 sec into a presentation. Since we all built some version of Tic Tac Toe, having a unique take was quite difficult.

Luckily, I fell behind and implemented an “inferior” method called polling, so that was my unique angle. I could teach the websocket gurus what they were missing out on. :) Also, I have no fear of public speaking given extensive practice with switch-side debate.

I demo’d my real-time Tic Tac Toe with its live url deployed on Render. I had Chrome DevTools open to show the console.logs saying "Hi I’m polling.” Then I walked through a presentation showing the polling implementation in code, which I obviously apologized for. Who wants to look at code in a PowerPoint, even if they’re techies?

Luckily the code in PowerPoint was well received, since I simplified it and used visuals so it was easy to follow along.

Feedback for me: figure out how to connect to a projector ahead of time - I was totally the person wasting time in front of an audience, fiddling with problematic sidecar/mirroring/Aircast with my Macbook. Protip: Disconnect from sidecar’ing with iPad first before connecting to another display.