After a couple of years of cancelled bookings due to COVID-19,
this year was the first time I’ve been able to attend AWS re:Invent.
What a conference. Unlike any other event I’ve ever seen, the scale of this thing is wild, even for Vegas.
Everyone warned me about travelling through LAX on the busiest travel day of the year.
But overall, things were pretty smooth.
After over 24 hours of flights and layovers, the trip from Adelaide->Sydney->Los Angeles->Las Vegas ended in a wonderful thanksgiving lunch with friends I hadn’t seen since 2019.

The conference was incredible. But here are five lessons for next time…

• Introduction to Google Cloud Code released earlier this year at Google Cloud Next. Looks like an awesome way of getting the inner development loop up and running much faster
• Lots of talk of “shifting left” (i.e. shifting the things that normally happen later in the development cycle to earlier on).
• Luke Million seeing us out with a DJ set was pretty cool.

We’re using Kubernetes on GCP for our entire platform these days, so I really wanted to get along to a conference and immerse myself in it.

This was a pretty cool conference, right on the lake. Topics-wise, Machine Learning was big this year, it seems to be more and more popular every year.

Overall, a great two weeks in Cleveland. I found a good CrossFit gym nearby so I could get in my lifts during the conference, and afterward caught the bus to NYC.

At the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (MCEC). Obviously, much smaller than PyCon US but still worth attending for a couple of days. No sprints etc.

Here are some notes from PyCon this year in Portland Oregon. My second time in Portland.