Week 1 of re:Invent 2020

In the spirit of the 2020 Pandemic, and since I rolled off of a client and into my Thanksgiving week break. I decided to give the re:Invent conference a try. I have sixteen hours of training time to use each year, may as well learn about the most significant cloud provider on the planet.

I used to love attending conferences on the west coast. Now I consider transit time before I sign up for anything. Two days in transit had better be really useful in my work, so almost every conference fails this test. I do not believe in the hallway conversation benefit. I find OSS IRCs and forums are the most useful method of meeting people that I really would love to work with in real life.

So my feelings about the first week. Skip the keynotes. If I attend in person and I do not know of a good local place to get breakfast, I go to the keynote. I made myself a great breakfast on Tuesday, did some work and then watched the AWS keynote. If you have something billable to do, skip the keynote.

My overall impression from this week is that I am glad that I did not commit a complete week of my life and treasure to this conference. Most of the sessions have been worth the thirty minutes. A few have been disappointing propaganda from AWS partners.

Ending single use plastics in India while also employing more people sounds like an excellent idea. Making artisans part of everyday life should improve the community in many other ways. People are valuable, tea in an earthen cup is valuable, and it tastes great.

I found a nice Spring on K8s explanation. It isn’t so much Spring as a good start for working in Kubernetes.