Rehearsed Remotely, Delivered Dramatically

A Virtual-to-Real-Stage experience

I've spent the last few days refining and rehearsing our little play for TeamSystem's first Tech Conference in Pesaro, Italy.

And yes, you read correctly.
It's a play.

Not just your regular talk.

Our team of 11 engineers will present a full-stack architecture and toolkit that our 1000+ colleagues will use to build most of our future modules and products.

No pressure.

Coming up with the idea wasn't the problem. Getting it through possibly over-conservative upper management wasn't the big fight I expected either. But they probably got used to my disruptive ideas over the years...

Anyway.

The big challenge was refining and rehearsing the play with a geographically distributed team without the budget for a gathering-in-real-world option.

Well...

... we got a bit inspired by a really funny movie ...

If you didn't watch the movie... it's a good movie! Come back later :-)

... where they use tech to overcome geography limitations ...

So we boldly began using our company's chat system (uh... Teams...) to meet and try each other's lines. Needless to say, we didn't have high expectations for that stuff to be working that much.

But we were wrong.

Okay, we are not streaming music. We are just exchanging lines while following a pre-made script from a shared Google Docs (Microsoft Word is NOT UP TO THAT GAME), and the slides on a PowerPoint (this one, I have to concede, offers quite dope functionalities. Plus, we were forced to use it).

So we met online for a couple of iterations and worked out the storyline in a pure Agile fashion.

Tomorrow is showtime. We will meet IRL once to run our first and only rehearsal; then, we will walk on the stage and do our best.

Comes what may!