Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

I speak at conferences/developer meetups on a regular basis, and this is intriguing.

I have two primary concerns:

1) When you’re doing a live presentation, making the occasional mistake is not only expected, it helps prove that what you’re doing is really live. With a tool like this, everything might be TOO perfect. Might have to start incorporating intentional flubs into the script to make things authentic.

2) I haven’t tried this out yet, but I wonder what happens when something goes wrong. I’ve had too many live situations impacted by some unforeseen thing. Forgot to clean up the working directory last time I ran the demo, or who knows what. I’d want to have the ability to take over the controls if needed.

And of course, the antidote to #2 is having very carefully planned repeatable steps with a “cleanup” at the beginning or end to prep for the next time around.

All said, very cool, and I’ll be trying this soon.

Edit: Downvotes, really?

The problem is while presenting my IQ is 20 points lower. I suppose this holds for many people. There are too many presentations on youtube which spend minutes just fixing typos.

I agree a few seem authentic but soon it just feels like a waste of time — and break in the flow of presentation.

Yeah, I absolutly agree with you there. There’s no doubt in my mind that this is valuable. I’ve had plenty of moments where the brain->finger->keyboard connection just fails under the pressure of a live demo.

> The problem is while presenting my IQ is 20 points lower.

I swear I've said these exact words.

I'm not sure about the 20 points number, the effect feels much larger. Perhaps if you simultaneously apply a 20% penalty to hand-eye coordination, balance, facial expressions, typing skills, enunciation, penmanship, memory/recall, creativity, etc. you could accurately represent my skill as a human being while presenting.

It's a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a keyboard is guaranteed to spot spelling errors and trivial errors absolutely last of everyone watching.

I think a nice workaround for this is to use something like a Jupyter Notebook (which also has bash support). You have all the commands pre-entered and you can step through as necessary.

If you need to add something because of an audience question you can just insert a new cell.

It looks live and in my opinion better than faffing in a terminal.

You also have the bonus of being able to provide the notebook to your audience after the talk (or they can follow along with you).

> I’d want to have the ability to take over the controls if needed.

^C and <esc> do interrupt the playback and print 'Aborted!' to stdout.

>Might have to start incorporating intentional flubs into the script to make things authentic

Unfortunately, flubs give a bit away by showing the temp file that's being run:

  $ datl
  /tmp/tmpzygMVj: line 4: datl: command not found

I also tried inserting some ^H backspaces in the script. It almost looks like it will work (shows the backspace and correction), then spits out "/tmp/tmp2qhBos: line 4: $'datl\be': command not found"

There's nothing wrong with doing things perfectly; mention you're using a script to avoid the demo effect if need be. Tools like this will really help speed up your presentation, especially if you're not too fast a typer.

Also for cleanup, wrap this command in its own shell script; for example:

    #!/bin/bash
    rm -rf temp || true
    doitlive session.sh

I don't think you need the "|| true" there.

Unfortunately, there is always something that can (and likely will) go wrong. You will always need a "fail gracefully" option.

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