Navigating technical failures

Geertjan Wielenga: The bane of a developer advocate's life is when you somehow can't connect your laptop to the projector. What do you do in those unexpected situations?

Simon Ritter: I've been faced with a few issues in the past. Going back to the #speakerfail Twitter story, Stuart Marks said that he arrived for one presentation that he was going to do and nobody turned up for it.

"Nobody turned up to my presentation."

—Simon Ritter

I actually had that happen early on in my career: nobody turned up to my presentation. I also had one day where one person turned up to my presentation, which was kind of nice because we then just had a chat about the subject. I think, in that case, the most important thing is not to let it worry you. If it happens repeatedly, then that probably indicates that speaking is not for you.

But if it happens once and you've only just started out, then...