Showing off your software with a great demo system

Not every software install is meant for production.  Some of your software’s most important deployments are short-lived systems such as

• Student systems for training classes

• Booth systems for trade shows

• “Leave behind” demos for prospective users

What do they have in common?  They’re your software’s first chance to make a great first impression.Remember, always do a live demo. A pre-recorded or slideware demo is way scarier than a broken one.

Unfortunately, demos are hard.  They take a long time to set up, you have to reconfigure them for last-minute software changes, and somehow, demos seem to break anyway.  Time to change that.  The good news is that software developers have figured most of this out already.

This talk will cover the basics of turning your software demo into a software project. We’ll cover how to save time, reduce risk, and increase a demo’s socks-knocking-off factor by using version control, test-driven development, and other stuff borrowed from “real” software work.

We’ll use the system package manager to create demo packages with sample data and setup/teardown scripts, along with Docker for building demo containers and Capstan to build run-anywhere VMs.