James Farrell

669 points
James Farrell

I am a long time UNIX system administrator and open source advocate. In recent years my primary focus as been on Linux & FreeBSD systems administration, networking, telecom, and SAN/storage management. I love building infrastructure, tying systems together, creating processes, and bringing people together in support of their technical efforts.

When I can, I try to contribute back to the open source projects either with patches, or by helping others in technical support forums.

Authored Comments

To me, it depends on the reason for demo.

I don't expect every demo to go perfect, especially if I'm asking questions or asking to see things ad-hoc.

If you are taking my time on a sales demo, it better be close to perfect .... I don't want to sit around wasting time when the presenter can't pull it together and cannot answer basic questions, etc.

If this is more of an agile demo, training sessions, etc. I do like seeing the troubleshooting process .. it will add in opportunities to probe deeper ... sometimes seeing a breakage and troubleshoot can offer insights into how we will need to support that new feature in the field, etc. It also makes opportunities to add feedback to improve the product for dev, test, and customer deployments.

Sometimes good demos melt down entirely. I very much appreciate it when a complete meltdown is recognized and the meeting is ended early and re-scheduled. That at least saves me time, and then I'm interested to discuss the meltdown later on.

Thanks Jen, love the picture ... I've been there!