Mad respect for live demoing in a talk on conference Wi-Fi. There is something to authenticity and embracing potential failure that flies in the face of the well manicured presentation culture we have today that needs to come back. As long as the talk can be done, or there is a plan b, why not? I think a lot of concern stems from wasting other people’s time: which is valid. But presenting is also a deeply culturally engrained performance art that sometimes sacrifices authenticity for appearances.
The trick is to assume conference WiFi does not exist and work against an all-local setup. Cache all the things :)
The other trick is to make material available to everyone, post-haste. This is especially important for remote talks [1].
Apropos embracing failure. I work hard to set up a smooth path. I don't want things to fail. Yet, I actively chose to be open to it because undoing the failure has a habit of creating a learning moment for someone among the dear listeners (they too try to debug in their head, and arrive at their own insight).
[1] In 2022, I gave a talk as a live demo at a remote conference. Three different networks at three different locations in my area flaked on me. My home network because of digging in my area, another mid-way through my talk because of power failures, and an otherwise-pretty-good wireless network because it lost packets exactly over my presentation and was just fine ten minutes after.
