Designing Demos That Don’t Lie: A Demo Engineer’s Guide

There’s a special kind of dread that comes from watching a demo you know will never survive first contact with a real codebase. On the surface, it looks slick: perfect sample data, pixel‑polished UI, a happy path that always works. Under the hood, it’s a one‑off build, stitched together just well enough to impress for 30 minutes and impossible to evolve into anything useful afterward. As a software engineer, my job is to avoid that trap. In this post, I’ll share how I think about building “hones