Demo day

What it is

Once a term, everyone who has been working on something presents it to the rest of the community. Short presentations, questions afterwards, no marks and no prizes.

It is deliberately a little uncomfortable

Presenting your own work is a skill, and the only way to acquire it is to do it in front of people. Almost everybody finds the first one unpleasant. Almost everybody finds the third one fine. That progression is the entire point of the event.

What you get out of it

• Practice at explaining technical work to people who did not build it
• Feedback from people who are not your friends being polite about it
• A portfolio piece you have actually talked through
• Confidence, which arrives afterwards rather than before
• Collaborators — a lot of second projects start on demo day

What to present

Anything you have worked on. It does not have to be finished, and it does not have to have worked. A five-minute talk on something that failed and what you learned from it is more useful to the room than a polished demo of a tutorial project.

Preparing

• Say what it is and who it is for in the first thirty seconds.
• Show the thing working before you explain how it works.
• Be honest about what is broken. Everyone in the room has broken things.
• Practise once out loud. Once is enough.