Today was the last day of the conference and it’s starting to show. People are heading home, so sessions are not that crowded and last session ends around noon / 1pm. People wearing conference badges are thinning out and replaced with more regular tourists.
I managed to get into a very good chalk talk about Cloudformation given by Check Meyer and Ryan Lohan. So a big thanks to them! We had a good discussion about tooling, feature requests and so on. This is also something that many people might overlook. AWS prioritizes features and their implementation on the basis of feedback received from customers. You do not have to be APN partner, done certifications, or anything like that. As Amazon/AWS themselves say, they try to be the most customer-centric company there is. The most important thing is that instead of silently contemplating on a feature or bug you should make yourself heard. Join AWS Developers slack. Use Twitter, AWS forums, email their evangelists or talk to their employees at any event. If the barrier is still too big you can email me or my colleagues and we can bring your case to AWS. Make yourself heard!
Finally, some tips & tricks in case you find yourself in Re:Invent 2019!
First, don’t be too greedy. There are tons of good sessions but the thing is – the sessions are recorded and can be watched at a later time Youtube. Chalk talks, workshops and hackathons are not. You get to talk to product-teams or their representatives in those. I can highly recommend attending those and if there are competing sessions at the same time try to prioritize chalk-talks and workshops higher than breakout sessions.
Second, as I’ve mentioned in the first post, Las Vegas is designed to remove your money from you. There will be coffee/soda/water provided by Re:Invent as well as some snacks. The expo area is excellent if you want to eat something. There is usually food being served. Hotels are expensive and if you need to buy something there are multiple Walgreens (shops) on the Strip.
Third, keynotes by Andy Jassy and Werner Vogels are great. However, you should consider passing the keynotes if there are some other interesting happening at the same time. For example hackathons or gamedays. Keynotes are usually recorded and any announcements made are also published on Twitter, blogs and so on.
Fourth, when booking your schedule try to cluster up the sessions/workshops/etc you are attending. Moving from one venue to another takes time. Cluster your sessions on certain venues. For example, The Mirage and Venetian are very close to each other. Moving between them is much easier than moving from Mira/Venetian to Aria/Vdara. On the other hand, Aria/Vdara/MGM are situated relatively close to each other.
Fifth, pick your parties. There are TONS of different parties hosted by AWS partners. You cannot visit all so choose early.
Sixth, talk to people. That might not be the easiest thing to do especially for us Finnish whose culture is not extroverted. ”Hey, my name is Aki. What do you with AWS?” and the conversation takes on.
Now it’s time to sign-off and get some rest before starting the long trip back home. Quoting Werner now it’s time to ”Go build”.
Jeff Bar, Abby Fuller and Simon Elisha before Twitch live
