Baby’s first keynote
Mandatory attire at a tech conference: t-shirt, blazer, leather sneaks. Right?
For the first time in many years, DigitalOcean hosted its bi-annual (that’s twice a year, not every two years) developer’s conference, Deploy, in person. The event took place in Austin, TX in January 2025.
I was approached to speak in the keynote in late November 2024, nary 2 months before the keynote. We brainstormed for about a week on topics, and landed on a plan for what I’d cover but it was up to me to determine how.
As a Mainer, I was stoked to leave Maine during January, period, and to Texas? Where it’s warm? And I don’t need a winter coat? Amazing. So stoked.
For the six months prior to my being asked to speak in the keynote at Deploy, I had served as the sole designer for DigitalOcean’s brand spanking new GenAI Platform (now the GradientAI Platform), an all-in-one AI agent building and serverless inference platform, where users can build autonomous AI agents without needing to manage the underlying infrastructure, models, or orchestration. Pick a model, give your agent some instructions, attach any context you want your agent to have, create an API key, and voila! You have an agent you can deploy on your website or integrate directly into your applications.
(I make that sound pretty easy and it is!)
Why me?
They tapped me, a designer!, for a number of reasons:
I knew the product inside and out, as I designed the entire thing from zero over the past six months, often handling everything from research to ideation to concepting to requirements gathering, to PRD writing and TDD review, to the actual design and documentation of the product and features.
Our PM had put in his notice, so he sure as heck wasn’t gonna do it.
I am a lady :]
The Process
Over a week or two following the initial agreement that I’d be showing off the GenAI Platform on its big Public Preview announcement day, we refined the narrative and I started working on my demo. The plan was…
I’d record a demo of myself identifying a problem, creating an agent, attaching contextual data to it, testing it out, and deploying it on our website to see if it worked.
This required me to…
create the dataset
create a demo website upon which we’d deploy the agent
create said agent
test said agent
And then, ya know, script writing, recording the demo, memorizing the script…
With help from my pal, Claude (pre-Claude code days and pre-Cursor being a thing and pre-Lovable 2.0 being a thing), I created a demo website for a luxury hotel chain, curated content about the hotel properties, including its extremely luxurious chartered catamaran tours (the focus of the demo), and then got to work recording all the bits and pieces of the demo to then cobble together what looked like a real-time demo.
Rule number 1 of demos - never do them live. But, the way I recorded the demo matched up perfectly with my script, so much so that when I spoke in the keynote, it really did come off as live (down to the timestamps on the screen, which I edited the HTML for during recording so they roughly estimated when I’d be doing the real demo in Austin on keynote day).
(I fooled quite a few folks 😈)
With a demo roughly organized, the script edited and memorized, my outfit picked out, and my bag packed, it was only inevitable that I had to rerecord the whole thing again multiple times before my plane took off, right?
(Right.)
Pre-show jitters
Not only was I absolutely wrecked with nerves about this opportunity, but Maine, where I live, and Boston, where I was flying out of, were slated to get a winter storm the evening before/morning of my flight out, and Austin was slated to get a storm the day after my arrival.
With my arrival at the Boston airport dependent on public transport, I opted to book a hotel the night before at the airport, which meant my sweet, incredible, patient, best man in the whole world husband drove me (in a snow storm) to Boston (2 hours each way) so I wouldn’t miss my first speaking event as a woman in STEM.
I left Maine for THIS?
Alas, I made it to Austin. And let me tell you something… running a conference is no joke. This was my first time being behind the scenes at an event of this scale and I was completely blown away.
The sausage making of conferences
Watching the team running the conference go through their checklists, wrangle the speakers, run through A/V with the company we contracted with, monitor the food and drinks, orchestrate with vendors, and somehow get us through two dress rehearsals, was something I can still barely wrap my head around.
This team of almost entirely women took charge of the entire event, down to the minute, and gave me such incredible pride in the power of teamwork, having each others backs, holding each other accountable, and giving grace where grace is due.
One thing I learned most of all is that, with an event of that size, something was inevitably going to go wrong. Our incredible design director, Evan, redid the entire presentation the night before due to an issue with the font we were using. Our event coordinators had to rig up a complex and intricately timed feed switch for both of my “live” demos, and we had to pipe in a few speakers whose flights were canceled due to weather and weren’t able to make the event.
Launch day (and keynote day)
Did I mention that, on the day of the conference, we were also switching on access to the entire GenAI Platform at 8am CT, so that at the time of the keynote (10am CT), it would be live for everyone to use?
Yeah. Excellent planning on our part.
Thanks in part to nerves, and in part to the time zone change, I was up, had run three miles, showered, had my makeup and hair done, and was dressed by 5am. I practiced my demos numerous times, tried to read a new book that released that morning that I was desperate to start 🐉, and finally made my way downstairs for our Go/No Go call.
As the acting PM at the time, as our PM had left the company the month prior, I was the one approving the feature flipper for the entire platform.
The Go/No Go had a few hiccups but ultimately we flipped on before I was expected in the lineup, which gave me just enough time to scarf down half a croissant and inhale a hotel coffee, before heading to the front row to rock back and forth nervously in the leadup to the event.
The art of faking the demo
Both demos I did were pre-recorded, but that didn’t mean I had it easy. I still memorized both of my scripts, as my job during the demo was to make it seem like it was happening in real time, down to the typing on the keyboard and the looking up at the screen for what was happening. Even though I had a script up on my laptop at the time of the demos, I was so nervous that I barely looked at it.
Yes, that is me rocking back and forth and whispering my script to myself.
Even though I was more nervous than I’d ever been in my life (okay, maybe not true but close!), both demos went smoothly an aside from a case of severe dry mouth, which was exacerbated by the fact that I left my dang water bottle at my seat, I was so incredibly proud of the ten-ish minutes I was up on stage.
There’s me, at 44 or so minutes in, doing my thang (the first demo was not related to the product I worked directly on but I got nominated to do the demo anyway, since I was going to be speaking, and I knew how the product worked so I spoke twice during the keynote!)
After the event, so many folks came up to me to say how impressed they were with the live demo (hehe), how easy I made it seem, how I was able to tell the story of the platform without making it too technical, and overall how nice it was to see a designer up on stage at a developer-focused event.
Even though I was trying to be good, I did sneak a look at Slack a few times throughout the day and was so heartened by the feedback I got that my little enneagram type 3 ego was totally stoked.
As I cheered on the rest of my colleagues as they demoed and spoke, I was so deeply in love with the process that I vowed I’d speak in another keynote again. It was such a powerful experience getting to tell the story of the platform from a user’s perspective, and not only to tell the story, but to show the story. Having someone like me up on stage to demo the product gives credence to the fact that we built it so that everyone, from the seasoned AI native developer who just wants an endpoint, to the PM tasked with experimenting with building a question-answer bot to put on their company’s website, could get their job done. With a tool I designed from a blank sheet of paper and a few hopes and dreams.
It may have been baby’s first keynote, but it certainly won’t be her last.
