What a Noisy Conference Booth Taught Me About Explaining Anything
January 14, 2026
I was an SE at HashiCorp, two years in, and I thought I knew how to talk about our products.
Then I volunteered for booth duty at Black Hat in Las Vegas — and found out I didn’t.
The floor was loud. Hundreds of conversations happening at once. People walking past fast, glancing at the booth, ready to keep moving unless you gave them a reason to stop.
I had slides. I had flyers. I had a folder full of marketing materials for every possible question about Terraform and Vault.
None of it mattered.
Within the first hour, I realized that no one wanted a feature walkthrough. They wanted to know one thing: what does this actually do for me, in plain English, right now.
The materials I had spent time preparing were built for a different environment — a quiet room, a captive audience, someone who had already agreed to listen. Black Hat was none of those things.
So I started improvising.
When someone asked what Terraform does, I stopped reaching for a slide and said:
“Imagine you’re a chef. Terraform is your recipe book for cloud infrastructure. It tells you exactly what ingredients you need and how to combine them to build your dish. Except instead of food, you’re building servers, networks, databases — and you can reproduce that exact dish anywhere in the world.”
They got it. Immediately. And they wanted to know more.
That moment changed how I explain technical things — not just at conferences, but in customer calls, in demos, in conversations with my own team.
Here’s what I learned:
Simplicity is not dumbing things down. It’s respecting the other person’s time and attention. The clearest explanation is almost always the most accurate one. Jargon is usually a sign that the speaker doesn’t fully understand what they’re explaining yet.
Stories land where facts slide off. Features and benefits go in one ear and out the other. A story — a real one, with a specific person or situation — sticks. When I stopped listing what Terraform does and started sharing what a customer did with it, the conversation changed.
Authenticity closes the gap. The most effective moments at that booth weren’t the polished ones. They were the honest ones — “that’s a great question and here’s what I actually think” — rather than falling back on the script.
I came home from Black Hat with no leads logged and no formal outcomes to report.
But I started every customer conversation differently after that. Less prepared, in the rigid sense. More present. More willing to find the analogy on the fly rather than pull up the deck.
The loudest conference floor turned out to be the best classroom I’ve had in tech.
What’s the best analogy you’ve ever heard for a technical concept? I’d love to collect them — drop it in the comments.