My Python script broke live in a Zoom demo yesterday

I was showing my boss a web scraper I spent 3 days on, and it crashed because I hardcoded a URL that expired. The error popped up right when he asked "so this works reliably right?" and I just sat there staring at the terminal. Anyone else have a demo fail so bad you wanted to crawl under the desk?

2 comments

2 Comments

thea_knight1d ago

so this works reliably right?" oh man i felt that in my gut. that question is cursed. i had a similar thing happen with a database migration script. what i started doing is adding a bunch of simple checks before the main logic runs. like try/except blocks that print a friendly message instead of a stack trace. also i always run the demo from a local copy now, not from the live version. that way if something breaks i can fix it quick without the whole world watching.

thea_knight1d ago

run the demo from a local copy" is the move honestly. i even go one step further and stage a whole fake environment that mimics the live setup so if something breaks i can just switch tabs and pretend everything's fine.