When technical glitches hit

Scott Davis: Resiliency is something we always talk about in software. I think resiliency is something you have to strive for as an instructor or as a conference speaker.

It's not avoiding technical glitches that makes you a pro: it's the grace and humor you use in reacting to the glitches when they inevitably happen. I've had a number of people come up to me after a talk that went badly and say, "I'm sorry that you had trouble up there on stage, but I probably learned more from watching you debug it in real time than if everything had gone right in the first place."

Nowadays, I take a screenshot of every website that I'm going to mention in my presentation and put it in my slides with a hyperlink. If I'm at a conference with good Wi-Fi, then I can click on the screenshot and seamlessly scroll around the live website as I talk about it.

If, on the other hand, I end up in a hotel conference room in the basement with crummy Wi...