I just came back from AWS:ReInvent 2023 and wanted to jot down some ideas I had about how to improve the experience next time.

First impressions – this conference was extremely well-run, very organized and FULL of helpful people eager to get you where you are going. Just like everything in Las Vegas, it felt like a thing designed to process you, a pipeline oriented around directing a sprayhose of humans to various areas. It’s people and crowd management at scale. That’s what it is and if you give up your individuality you can get whisked around and processed quickly. Swimming against the stream doesn’t work well.

Do’s and Don’ts:

• Do register early and get flights and hotel rooms early. As a late registrant, I stayed in a non-conference hotel and had to do a lot of travel to get started where other attendees were.
• Do try to keep most sessions within a venue. The transportation options are good, but walking in Las Vegas is a fool’s game. The conference centers are massive. The casinos are massive. It takes forever to get around. Even if you get on a shuttle, there is traffic. It’s difficult to move between venues.
• Do reserve sessions seats early when they come out. Many sessions I wanted to attend were fully-reserved. This isn’t a big problem as there is plenty of space for walk-ins, but it means having to queue up for the walk-in space early, which limits your time and makes it hard to switch venues.
• Do leave room for breakfast and lunch. It’s grueling focusing intently for long periods. Your brain needs energy for it. The AWS ReInvent folks provide meals for breakfast and lunch, but it’s easy to miss them if you have a session at that time. This isn’t such a big deal, except the venues are massive, so it takes a long time to get out and get to somewhere else that has decent food. The food at the venues was much healthier and better than a lot of the easy-to-get food in the casinos etc.
• Don’t get too hyped about RePlay unless that’s really your jam. I’m sad I didn’t get there in time for the Linda Lindas, but conference wrap parties in general seem like getting on a bus, getting a few beverages, watching the band, getting back on a bus. Our bus got stuck behind tons of other busses on the road and we eventually walked to the venue. It’s a logistics nightmare to try to get 65K people in and out of a single concert in a reasonable timeframe. I had a lot more fun doing side events with my co-workers like checking out the Sphere and going to OmegaMart.
• Don’t go to “Builder’s Sessions”. Your mileage may vary, but I found these uniformly unhelpful. The session is a very brief talk, then following a tutorial at a rapid pace. There is very little context. The session names seemed interesting, but generally they were not educational – they were just a way to step quickly through a pre-configured tutorial. There was no explanation of WHY to do anything – many of the instructions were “copy paste this text”. At the end of any of these sessions, there was no time to ask questions and I don’t think I got much from them. I don’t think anyone who attended one added any new skill.
• Do go to big talks in big rooms. The best talks get the big rooms. Figure out capacity and try to attend these. The best talk I attended, “Building Observability to Increase Resiliency” was in a big room, and I loved it.
• Do meet with product managers for products you use. You get a lot of information and they can speak about things that aren’t published or take your specific nuanced feedback about usage. I found this super useful. I got to talk about what would specifically impact my team and our way of working.
• Do watch the keynotes via stream in your hotel room. They don’t hand out any special goodies. The hotel is comfy. The editing is good.
• Do register for new sessions after they keynote. They unlock new sessions related to the just announced stuff. Most of the just announced stuff didn’t really thrill me, but there is a helpful filter in the catalog for “just launched” sessions.

Most of the sessions I attended really were laser focused on the AWS product, which, you know, fair enough. It’s not a generalist conference. But my favorite session took great lessons about a subject and then applied them to how to use AWS products.