<aside> 🔥 Trending on the front page of Hacker News and r/node on 09/05/2022

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Sept 05, 2022 Rahul Sharma

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Presenting a product or app demo is almost synonymous to “showing” something on the UI — a user journey, page navigation, slick modals, responsive layouts, and so on. However, the demos need not contain a visual aspect (e.g., API development, data engineering, CI/CD). In such cases, there’s no “UI” to show which makes it tricky to convey the message to the audience.

I have been a reviewer of numerous such “Backend demos” where the presentation was often underwhelming, not because of the content itself, but a lack of presentation medium.

<aside> đź’ˇ Presenting a Backend demo to a non-technical audience becomes especially challenging as you have finite amount of time to hold their attention and deliver the message without losing them in technical jargon.

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Here are my top 5 tips to level up your next Backend demo.

1. Start with a diagram

Any kind of Backend demo (API server, data pipeline, CI/CD) should start with an overall architecture diagram. This helps the audience to,

  1. Understand how different components work together
  2. Identify the component being demo’d currently
  3. Provide context and facilitate effective discussions

There are tons of tools available in the market to create diagrams depending on the use case (e.g., ER diagrams, Flowcharts, Cloud diagrams). My favorites include Draw.io (low-fidelity) and Figma (high-fidelity).