re re:Invent
and here we go again

I have attended AWS re:Invent conference twice, in 2012 and 2013. This year as the Head of AWS Business from Fiare Consulting will mark my third visit to the conference.

During the conference I’ll be tweeting, posting some stuff here and potentially also in my LinkedIn feed. I do not have high expectations of visibility, so you can read these posts in different media as sort of a process where I collate my conference experiences and try to understand them better in my own context. If someone finds these useful, that’s nice too.

I flew in through Arlanda — how probable is it you are sitting next to another senior from another consultancy going to the same conference? Empirically: not zero.

I flew in already on Saturday, giving me Sunday to adjust to the time difference. While it is sometimes possible to avoid full timezone adjustment, re:Invent is such an intensive event that it is necessary to be full physical and mental strength, and that’s why I reserved a day for that. (I also exercised heavily by hiking to Turtle Head Peak in Red Rock Canyon, and got fresh air and plenty of exposure to sun, all of that helping the body to adjust.)

Anyway, this conference has gotten bigger and bigger. While I cannot remember exact numbers out of my head, it almost doubled from 2012 to 2013 (from several thousands to almost ten thousand, if my memory serves correctly). Last year it was 43 000 and probably quite a few more this time.

While re:Invent was smaller way way back, and while it was definitely more compact (all of it fit in the Sands expo centre), let’s not get too nostalgic: it was big even five years ago. There was absolutely no way you could attend all of the interesting sessions nor meet all the people you thought you’d want to meet! The fact that there are now even more sessions, spread over multiple locations on the Strip does make some practical things harder — but “seeing all” was back then as impossible as it is today.

I have other comments to come, but I’ll cut this post short and just get it out.

(You can see all posts from re:Invent 2018 following the reinvent2018 tag.)