Jerry Chen

Ok but actually our vibe coded booth looks sick — come check us out at @aiDotEngineer CODE in SF this week and see a demo

This is what I get for vibe coding our booth design

On my way to SF for @aiDotEngineer CODE, to give a talk and host the first ever Niteshift conference booth. Booth demos were a huge part of Datadog’s early GTM success (we’re an ex-Datadog founding team), because we did things a bit differently: - Engineer staff: devs working directly on the product were the primary booth staff - Demos, demos, demos — the whole goal of the booth was to give as many (great!) demos as possible. At one AWS re:Invent, I remember us giving 20k-30k demos out of a total of 60k for the conference in just a few days - Demos are visually distinctive from 30 feet away and looked like nothing else on the market. Screens were oriented vertically. - 5-8 minutes per demo, tightly scripted. Though since the engineers knew the product, we frequently went off script - No chairs. Staff were always looking up and engaged, greeting passerby and looking eager to demo (yes, shifts were very hard work) - Extended follow up questions handed off to an “expert” desk in the center of the booth to keep demos moving - No one too senior to demo. Even as a VP managing hundreds of engineers (with a full schedule of customer meetings), I made time to demo every AWS re:Invent - Integration logos: biggest objection was always “ok sick demo, but no way this will work with *my* stack” So, we had an integrations page with a wall of logos of every DB, queue, language, framework, cloud service out there (along with the actual integrations to back it up) - Swag: everyone loved the purple Datadog t shirts. Insanely soft, so even if tech t shirts weren’t your vibe, they were great for the gym, as pajamas, or for giving to your partner. I still own about a dozen of these shirts. At @niteshiftdev, we have to chart our own path, but the core principles remain. We’ve worked hard on our first set of booth demos and I have a suitcase full of the first ever NITESHIFT t-shirts. We are excited to share it with you all. Hit us up if you’ll be at the conference!

Transitioning dev to the cloud is as inevitable as moving production to the cloud, but it’s going to take time, and we (ie @niteshiftdev and other providers) are going to have to win users over by simply shipping a better product. Can’t expect users to move for any other reason.

Niteshift has always been cloud-only, which makes us a bit different than other tools out there. Because of this focus, we’ve been able to handle the most complex environments and accelerate the work of top teams with cloud agents