This year I had the opportunity to talk at RailsConf 2022 in Portland, OR! The talk was titled RAILS_ENV=demo, and was about my team's multi-year journey to shipping a reliable demo environment, as well as the friends (or, rather, "personas") we made along the way!

It's now live on YouTube:

I decided to try something new, and constructed the slides with Slidev and Excalidraw. Click here to view them online:

A PDF is also available here, and the source code available on GitHub.

And here's the abstract from the RailsConf program/website:

Today’s the day. You’ve prepared your pitch, deployed a special copy of your app, and confirmed—in a trial run—that your walkthrough is ready for a live audience. But, now, when you attempt to log in, something breaks. Flustered, you debug, apologize, and debug some more, before finally calling it quits. Next time, you’ll bring a prerecorded screencast... 😮‍💨

What could’ve been done to make the app more reliably "demoable"? Join us, as we use "stateful fakes" and "personas" to produce a testable, maintainable, and failure-resistant "demo" deployment, with production-like uptime guarantees!