DISCLAIMER: No, I don’t believe I’m the universe’s gift to DevRel. I don’t have all the answers, all the skills, or even all the Pokemon. What I have is my experiences, collected over the 11 years I’ve been doing this work. That – my experiences and observations – are what I’m sharing in this series.
Before this blog gets de-listed for potentially purile content, let me explain up-front what “un-natural act” I’m referring to:
Yeah, THAT un-natural act. Like… you’re at a conference, enjoying the talks, meeting new people, and having a great time. You decide to take a swing through the vendor space, mostly to see what combination of socks, t-shirts, pens, and charging cables you can snag for free.
Stopping at a booth, you’re chatted up by one of the staff, and they say… something clearly compelling. It might even border on mind-control. Your response is to pull out your laptop, head to the vendor’s website, start a free trial, and play around with their software.
This, my friends, is an absolute fever dream. I’m sorry, but I’m not giving up my time (to say nothing of my anonymity) for “a chance to win this Lego Millennium Falcon”. Anyone who thinks this would work has not hung around humans – and specifically humans working in the tech sector – enough. Short of something like “and you’ll immediately get a Lamborghini” (or 1 million dollars, or a lifetime supply of delicious chocolate cake), there’s nothing I can imagine a vendor saying to me that would get anyone to ACTUALLY do the deed.
Or can you? It turns out, I’ve found a way to do just that. In fact, this technique – tested over 3 years at ~20 different events – consistently delivered a sign-up rate of 10% of the overall attendees. So if the event has 300 people, this technique got me ~30 sign-ups. But at a 3,000 person event, we saw 300 sign ups. Because you probably work in tech and love data, I will admit that there’s an upper-bound at around 5,000 people. Going to re:Invent (about 60,000 people) did NOT garner 6,000 sign ups. However I attribute that to the fact that all 60,000 people didn’t swing by the booth.
But the point stands – this technique gets a non-zero number of folks to take a moment, RIGHT NOW, and sign up. If you’ve been working the booth at conferences for any amount of time, you know that’s worth a lot of $5-a-pair branded aviator glasses.
The first thing I did was take my company’s software (remember, I work in monitoring and observability) and incorporated into a game. I found a existing 90’s style side-scroller
[](https://i0.wp.com/adatosystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/dave-game.jpg?ssl=1)
and instrumented it with additional monitoring that collected everything from CPU, RAM, and network stats to the number of gems collected, the top level achieved, the speed of movement, etc.
[](https://i0.wp.com/adatosystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/dave-dash.png?ssl=1)
[](https://i0.wp.com/adatosystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Dave-Dashboard-Screen-Shot-v2-scaled.png?ssl=1)
I built a portable display that allowed someone to play the game AND ALSO see the dashboard in my company’s portal that showed all the monitoring statistics.
[](https://i0.wp.com/adatosystems.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/gamesuitcase-scaled.jpg?ssl=1)
Once this is up and running in the conference booth, people will naturally gravitated to it. A game display is just too enticing NOT to stop and check out. It allowed me to not only invite people to play (and even compete against each other) but I also used the game as a springboard for conversations – describing HOW each of the game elements was instrumented, collected, and displayed, which naturally led to discussing real-world use cases that were closer to home for the attendee.
The best part was that, because the example I used was a game, folks didn’t get hung up on “that’s not like my business” but also it got past the “what are you trying to sell me” resistance that everyone (myself included) feels when passing by a vendor booth at a conference.
Packaging everything up to use in the booth is one thing. But what if you made it so the users THEMSELVES could download the game, pre-instrumented, and load up the dashboard in your portal?
That’s exactly what I did. First I made everything as simple as possible – bundling the game AND monitoring agent into a single downloadable bundle.