A few personal stories from re:Invent 2022

As we are now in the post:Invent phase of 2022 and over 10 days have passed since re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas was concluded, it’s time for a lot of re:Cap Blog posts and events.
I’ve read so many of those “major announcments” articles that I’ve decided to write a different type of re:Cap for myself this year:
Sharing a few stories from my 10+ days in Las Vegas, as they are as equally important as the technical announcements made by AWS.

Indeed, it was a great conference with a lot of learnings and a lot of very interesting sessions. I focused on Chalk Talks, Builder’s sessions and events (like Gameday) as these are not recorded.

Making new friends before re:Invent kicks off

My flight this year got moved from Saturday to Friday, so I had one more day to get over Jet-Lag. On Friday, I spend a good time shopping and besides that met with Oliver vor dinner. On saturday morning (early morning!), I looked at the AWS Community Builders Slack and found out that Traian set up a “spontanous breakfast” for the Jet-lagged folks - and I ended up sitting over two hours with different parties, having fun, chatting and getting to know people. It was exciting to meet Rafael, who had been our Solutions Architect for a while, for the first time in person - without planning it :-)
It was also great to meet Heitor in person - the person that owns the Lambda Power Tools at AWS. His talk is now on Youtube and I would encourage you to listen to it if you are interested in Open Source.

The rest of the saturday I spend with Markus, who shared so much Las Vegas knowledge with me that I think my brain is still burning - and I would not dare to claim remembering more than half of what we discussed - but it was a great saturday which ended with meeting Philipp for dinner at “The Cheasecake factory”.

I kicked off the sunday with a lot of excitement about my very first talk at re:Invent - final technical check in the “Speaker Ready Room” for my slide deck! That needed to be early morning, because afterwards I had planned to go out hiking with fellow AWS Community Builders.

Hiking across time zones and cultures

Definately one of my highlights this year: The ever first AWS Community Builders pre:Invent Hiking Trip!

Thanks to everyone that joined - Oliver, Richard, Jenn, Ganesh, Traian, Pubudu, Niklas. It was great to see how we supported each other, had great conversations and all managed to get across different challenges we had to fight!

Thank you Oliver (and kreuzwerker) for the amazing video.
Traian, you’re my hero. Congratulations on finishing off the hike with us with. Thats an achievement noone can take away.

It was fascinating to meet you all for the first time and notice that we get a long well, without ever meeting before. That’s the power of the AWS community!

We got back at 6pm, after a over 5 hours hike, just in time to get our AWS re:Invent badges and to meet other AWS Community Builders from around the globe for a great dinner. Lilly & Jason - thanks for joining us, that really made me happy!

Welcome to re:Invent

Kicking off re:Invent with a GameDay with a great team an Jeff Barr

I decided to kick off my re:Invent on Monday with a GameDay - which is a fascinating opportunity for gamified learning. On sunday, during our hike, I had aligned with Niklas to form a team together - and the other two team members, JaeJun and Martin, we met in the morning. We had great fun, ended up 4th even tho Jeff Barr distracted us for some time as we won him on our table with a quizz. It was great meeting him in person - and I can tell you: He is a human as we are, even if his Newsblog is legendary :-)

Meeting people from the AWS Community

I had so much great hours in Las Vegas - thanks for the time spend together, everyone that I’ve met - Stefanie, Oliver, Manuel, Mike, Stefan, Philipp, Markus, Thorsten - and others - from the german community.

Finally met Danielle and Matt in person. Another of my highlights.

The Community Builders Mixer and the User Group Leader Mixer where both great events to get to know each other better and network with great people from everywhere in the world. I met so many people that I had been interacting with in written (Slack, Twitter, LinkedIn) - it was a blast for myself.

Famous Jenga-game with AWS Heros - so much fun!

Speaking at re:Invent 2022 - my DevChat

As I’ve already shared before this year I had the opportunity to speak at re:Invent - COM307 - Using CDK pipelines (in Java) to build a multi-platform Flutter application

Thanks for everyone that made this possible: Ernesto, Shantavia, Lilly, Jason, Maria! It was my biggest honor to share my experiences and my open source initiative. Looking forward to keep sharing knowledge!

Announcing Amazon CodeCatalyst

With the announcement of Amazon CodeCatalyst the conference brought for me a new service that I am eager to use and try out as I am very much interested in CI/CD on AWS.
This was for me definately the most exciting anouncement of re:Invent 2022 and I had a lot of interest to talk to the service team, product managers and others after the service had been announced. I’m looking forward to share more about that as I get to play around with it more.

Flying out

On saturday my trip to re:Invent was over and it ended as my re:Invent trip began: meeting AWS interested persons at the airport (Thanks Maria for the introduction!) and with great conversations with Oliver on the way back to Frankfurt.

Thanks to everyone that I met and talked to at re:Invent 2022 - you really made this conference be a different one for me than it was before.

I’m looking forward to hopefully meet all of you again in 2023!