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Stacy Cashmore
Stacy Cashmore

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Sometimes things go wrong

Over the last week or so Cloud Summit has allowed some amazing speakers to share knowledge on a wide range of (Azure focused) cloud tech.

I was really honoured to be among that group showing how we can use Azure Static Web Apps with Blazor to start to build out own place on the web.

It's a talk that I really love giving. It's fun to do, and of all the Azure resources that I've seen over the last year it's the one that I really so much value for the cost of getting something set-up.

This post, however, isn't about that tech directly. Rather it's about the fun and games that I had when trying to give my demo πŸ˜…

You see... I started fine. My studio was set up. Lighting was fine, machine was working ok. Phone was on mute. I gave my talk introduction and got to the demo.

And... Someone from work called, my ring tone filled the studio.

Panic! Did I forget to mute my phone? Damn!!!!! What, no it's muted.

The noise wasn't coming from the phone. It was coming from the iPad on the other side of the room. Bad words went through my head. Something I didn't know about Apple devices (I've recently moved to an iPhone and iPad) Apple let you receive calls on iPads as well. It just gets routed to the phone. Even though my phone was on mute. Very cool, but not right now πŸ˜…

I cancelled the call on my watch (not an Apple Watch 😜) swore to myself again, and continued.

Only now I am really, really distracted. And trying to get back into the flow.

And... I forgot to do something important in the demo and it failed... Thankfully I realised quickly what the problem was and fixed it.

But it had cost me time. Which meant I couldn't show all of the cool features I wanted to before the end of my talk. Damn.

I laughed it off (externally at least) and just made a couple of self-depreciating jokes about it.

Mistakes happen (especially in live demos!), learn from them (don't have the iPad in the studio when presenting) and just do the best you can. You can't do better 😁

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