The show must go on (busted PC edition)

DataBS conf is this Wednesday! Tomorrow! Check out the schedule. And get your ticket to join. Also remember that the CHAT will not be on zoom (it's terrible) and on our discord instead.

Writing this week's post from my phone right now because over the weekend we had a brief power outage and my desktop PC that I do all my non-work work has apparently thrown a hardware fit. It would freeze on occasion after the big move last year for unknown reasons, but it's not gone from "occasionally" to "consistently", within a minute of starting up. And thus, it's 2 days before dataBS conf and I have a pile of computer parts all over my desk and a new motherboard out on express delivery within a few hours.

Anyways, this isn't a post about data work, it's a post about running events. While you would think that I'd be freaking out in a panic at losing my primary computer before and event, I'm mostly just annoyed at the inconvenience. If this sounds like an utter nightmare that underlines why you'd never run an event, hopefully this will help with those fears.

The backup plans

Running a scrappy event like dataBS conf, which isn't a giant formal production, requires just a handful of things to function on conference day.

• The speakers, obviously
• The host speaking and introducing speakers
• The webcast software working
• Someone recording
• Access to discord to read chat and questions
• Access to browser to handle misc issues with registration or whatever

In this day and age, all those tasks with the exception of recording video can be done in a modern browser. While I'll complain about desktop apps being dressed up web apps shoved into a bloated electron container, it does mean that work has become very portable.

So what about recording? Well, part of the reason I'm using zoom to host the event is because I know their cloud recording service will easily handle the 7+ hours of the event. I'm sure other vendor platforms can do similar things too, this is just the one I have direct experience with.

Prior to cloud recordings, I actually had to set up a second machine to record the whole stream and there was all sorts of issues with that. One year, I was screen capping and forgot that I had a program that turned my display more red as nighttime approached. That distorted the colors for over half the recording and was essentially unusable. We only survived that incident because someone else had independently recorded their own stream and shared their copy with me. Other times I was recording on 2 separate machines and barely got one usable copy because various popups or whatever jumped onto the screen at bad times. I'm so happy to have a recorder in the cloud that has direct access to the feed without all this nonsense.

So now, if I can't repair my PC tonight because the GPU or CPU is what is dying, then I'll just find a decent machine that has a modern browser and I can just hook up my webcam and complicated mic setup up to it and we can go. I've got a bunch of weaker (but still strong enough to host) PCs connected to TVs or other things around the house. Gone are the days when the house only had one computer and if something broke you couldn't even look up how to troubleshoot things.

If things get REALLY bad, like say, a tree collapses and demolishes my power and internet lines, modern cloud-based tech means that I can run the event off of my phone. It'd be awkward and very annoying to do so, but it is within the realm of possibility.

So we're going to be fine on Wednesday. If something were to go extremely wrong, I can have one of the volunteers jump in. We've got so many different layers of backup plans and setups, we're covered. It's the swiss cheese model of risk management in action.

If this were a bigger production this would hurt more since we would probably be doing stuff like broadcasting from OBS with nicer overlays and stuff, all of which would be saved on my disconnected hard drive, but we aren't!

Learn from dry runs

Finally, I've had people ask me how do I learn to make all these backup plans ahead of time? Is there some kind of checklist or resource that exists to reference? And the answer is... you use your imagination as best you can to foresee issues, but after that it's all about learning what curveballs reality will throw at you.

Dry runs help immensely with making sure you understand how everything works. That'll help debug all sorts of technical issues that are much harder to fix live, like making sure your demo videos play and the microphone setup lets everyone say and hear what they need to do.

Then you'll have to deal with the issues that happen live. I've had speakers misread the schedule timezone and came late an hour. I've had speakers lose power or have their mics die minutes before presenting and we had to shuffle the schedule on the fly. Take a breath. It's fine. It'll work out. All this can be solved and people usually understand when "tech happens". The show keeps going.

See everyone Wednesday 10AM! Bring your friends!

Late night update – the replacement motherboard seems to have fixed the issue! That's one less headache to deal with.

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I’m Randy Au, Quantitative UX researcher, former data analyst, and general-purpose data and tech nerd. Counting Stuff is a weekly newsletter about the less-than-sexy aspects of data science, UX research and tech. With some excursions into other fun topics.

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