My hack day tradition
I have a hack day tradition. It’s not something cheesy like wearing my favorite shirt or having a certain type of food for breakfast. My new tradition is having my demos bomb.
The tradition started back in September 2006. I was chugging through my slides and made it to the point where it was time to show some running code. Right at that moment our Chief Product Officer, Ash Patel (pictured above), walked in. There’s nothing quite like going from “hey, awesome…an exec is here to see my talk” to “*$&! my demo just bombed in front of Ash.”
Today, the tradition continued. Dan managed to make it through his half of our talk with no issues. I took the podium to take up the second half. I was flowing through the simple slides I had put together and was heading right into the online demos I was going to do. I brought up the site, clicked a link…nothing. Checked another site…nothing. Someone in the crowd yelled out that connectivity was down. Crap. Deep down, I knew what happened. Ash had arrived…
So I started calling out, “Ash is here, isn’t he?” I did it jokingly, I hadn’t actually seen him. Sure enough, 30 seconds later, Ash was standing at the back of the crowd, waving with a smile. Now…I don’t want to say he’s a jinx, but it is becoming an awful coincidence that he’s around during my most spectacular bombs. 
Photo courtesy of davglass.
