re:Invent 2022 Holly’s recap

Initially I thought of making this article a formal “recap”, but I’m always conscious of the excessive amount of information the world has to offer, so I’m going to leave the formal recap to people that have already carefully crafted them (see good, better and funny) and keep this as a personal reflection post.

The year of 2022 marks my 5th year entering the IT industry and I was lucky enough to be invited by #Versent to attend the re:Invent conference. Being a DevOps engineer from day 1 of my career, I know what it means and everything behind it when people talk about re:Invent. The excitement and thrill finally came into reality when I passed the US custom at LA airport on Sunday night - I have made it into US!

From the moment you land the Las Vegas Harry Reid airport, you are officially standing in the “Time Square” of DevOps. At each and every corner there are hundreds of shiny vendor ad billboards that could not fill in anymore colors, beaming and flickering to get more of your attention of their products. Even the welcome poster stands and luggage belts have massive sponsor logo on top. AWS mentioned the best way to pickup the conference badge was at the airport stall, but what welcomed us was a 2-hour long queue when we get there on Sunday night 10pm. It was an easy decision, we decided to get to it on the next day at the conference.

Day 1: at the conference it reminded myself of freshman year in uni. As it was my first time in US, I lost completely in the temptation to explore US and Las Vegas and did not get (successfully) to a single session. I got up at 9 and tried to get hold of a SIM card and the conference pass, managed to dodge the “artists” on the street. Although everyone has been telling me do not trust the map and underestimate the distance between two places, I’m still fascinated by the scale of everything in Vegas - everything is unnecessarily massive. By the time I got to the conference centre and got myself a Starbucks “Iced Toasted Vanilla Oatmilk Shaken Espresso with Coconut Salted Caramel Cream Cold Foam, Not Toasted Caramel Cream Cold Foam, 1 Pump Sugar Free Vanilla Syrup and 2 Espresso Shots” drink (recommended by a close friend, still tastes pretty close to water to me), it’s already 12pm and everyone start heading to lunch.

I went into the conference lunch hall and again, it’s the biggest room I’ve ever seen in my life. I found a place to sit down and managed to have some smooth conversation with people sitting next to me. We talked about the role/position title difference in AU/US/HK. I’m quite familiar with the lack of term “DevOps” being used in US: the common perception is that everyone should be doing full-stack and not focusing on a small part of the SDLC process, which I highly agree with and think this is something that Australia IT industry need to catchup with in the next decade. Still, a manager from Bay Area told me he normally advertise a “DevOps” role (as we do in AU) as “System Engineer”, and the latter would normally imply the position comes from a slightly old-fashioned team and lack of modern agile approach in the ways of working, if it was advertised in Melbourne. Meanwhile HK job market shares the same conception as we do.

During my lunch I ran into a coworker of mine and we decided to make the rest of day a trip to Hoover Dam. It was already 1pm, but a few clicks on Google took us to a rental car that we can pick up in 30m. We took another two colleagues and start heading out. Driving in US feels really odd, especially when we go through roundabouts. People do not indicate when they change lanes either. I’m really glad I did not have to drive.

We spent the afternoon walking around in Hoover Dam and start heading back early evening. The sunset over Vegas city skyline was beautiful, with a bit chill of the desert breeze. In the evening we met the rest of Versent group and had a few drinks. We didn’t make it to the Monday evening’s keynote, I learned that you need to line up 90m before the keynote to be able to get in.

Day 2: I took the above lesson learned and got up at 6:30am to catch the CEO’s keynote. Get to the conference at 7:30 and managed to get a corner seat. The warm up performance played AC/DC and Linkin Park, it was the right song to wake me up after 4 hours of sleep. The speech was a bit dry for me. I appreciate technical inspiring topic and true showmanship, it was neither. Half of the talk was about new AWS service offerings, some are exciting enhancements (zero ETL for AWS RedShift, millisecond Lambda launch so no more cold-start), but others are new service offering that is basically more abstraction on existing services. I’m not big fan of these highly abstracted services as they sometimes make engineers lazy and the cause more problems due to the limitation of the abstracted design. One of the big focus of this keynote was Amazon’s effort partnering with several energy company to build more sustainable future, seems this company is going to transition to an infrastructure provider? We will see in the next 10 years.

After the keynote we explored the Expo. Got myself several swags and played a few games. In the afternoon I walked off the shopping district, I was very excited to see Forever 21 still exist in US so got myself a few good stuff (including a $2 necklace). Caught an hour power-nap back at hotel and head out again with colleagues for the evening. We explored the old Vegas, lose a couple hundreds at a $10 table and then crashed the Snowflake party. We had so much fun and even get kicked out from the dance platform. It was a great night.

Day 3: I really need to start doing some sessions. Got up at 9 and successfully made into a SaaS control plane session. It was 300 intermediate level, but the speaker got caught up in a conversation with the audience for about 10 minutes explaining what’s the difference of SaaS control plane and customer’s admin portal. This feels like a basic conversation for whoever that’s 2 weeks into working on SaaS. I left the session early and went to another session about S3 deep dive. It was the best session I went to this week. I’m always interested in the underlying infra mechanism of S3 implementation, what makes it eleven-nine etc. One of my passion project is to implement a S3 service on my own, with multiple staged goals. I also think this is a great scenario question for a system design interview.

During lunch I spoke to a few people sitting next to me, and one of them was from ACloudGuru. I guess I have not followed the news enough to miss when they got bought by PluralSight. In the afternoon I tried to get a few more swags for my team back in Melbourne, I did a cloud trivia at the ACloudGuru hall and easily won the 1st place (yay). I really like trivia and hope there’s a pub in Melbourne that we could do DevOps trivia (maybe not).

For the evening the fun continues. We had a Versent team dinner, went to a NetApp party and hit the dance floor (again). Late at night we picked up someone on the street and he happened to be a marketing director at Apple. We had another great chat at a random food hall with cheap beer and late night pizza. It was magical.

Day 4: woke up at 6am to catch the 8:30 Dr Werner’s keynote. I had to set alarms on 3 separate devices to make sure I do get up after 4h sleep, I won’t miss it for the world. The warm up performance was a bit dull, I don’t think violin trio really suits the conference theme. The keynote start with a movie featuring Dr Werner in a 1999 sci-fi movie about the world being a system of synchronous virtual realities, and the key message is that the world is asynchronous. It was a mix of hilarious, sarcasm and technical foresight, and executed nicely with great taste.?It’s officially my favorite short film about technology, and I’m so glad I was able to catch it live at the conference. The opening movie lead to the discussion about Event Driven Architecture: there is no simple solution to complex problems, and complex system needs to be backed by EDA that is able to handle asynchronous messages/events. Some of our clients are heavily adopting EDA pattern as a foundation in design criteria, but IMO the pattern should be a tool to service the performance and delivery, and needs to be carefully executed when it’s applied to vast amount of projects.

I managed to squeeze in another Integration pattern and distributed systems session before noon and it was very thought provoking. A lot of designs are well architected but poorly implemented, and I see it as a result of disconnect in the teams doing these two sides of the work, and also disconnect between build and operation.

By lunch time I was a bit tired from lack of sleep and too much activities, but I met a lady sitting with me at the same table and we had an amazing chat. She is a marketing director and works at one of the vendor stalls in Expo. I asked her about how to network with people at these conferences, she gave me a tip which is to go network with a goal/outcome in head, as it’s much harder when you don’t have a direction to drive the conversation. I have constantly found myself finding random topics to talk about (which doesn’t always lead to bad/awkward outcome) but this does give me a new perspective.

Evening is the official re:Play party. I cannot believe my first music festival (after many years) would be at a tech conference. Seeing Martin Gerrix at the main stage was amazing, I hope there were more people dancing with us and enjoy themselves.

Day 5: checkout at 12pm and went to catch my colleagues at Denny’s. I love American diners and always wanted to go to one that’s like all these US movies I’ve been watching this year. Denny’s definitely made my dream came true. The breakfast pancake was big portion, accompanied by earthy taste coffee and absolutely messy when finish. It was everything I have pictured.

There were sessions going on day 5 but I don’t know anyone that actually end up going. I think by that time I’m happy to call it a quiet day for me. We had our last drink at the Vegas airport and everyone agreed this trip was as good as it could have be. We had the perfect amount of work and networking, and too much fun. I could not think of a better way to have a tech conference.

On the flight out from Vegas, I talked to someone sitting next to me and not only he happened to be a presenter at re:Invent, he is also from Melbourne and work in the same building as I do! I invited him over to Versent to replay his chalk talk session at the conference in the next few weeks. Even the conference has finished, but the gift of re:Invent surely keeps on giving.

My main reflection on this trip is that I could have lived like this every day in my life. I do not have to wait till I go overseas to live fully, similarly I do not have to bring up my courage to talk to other people only until I go to a work conference. I completed this conference as how I wanted to live my life: not following any set agenda, but push really hard and experience as much as I can. This has worked out for the best and I would not have done it any other way.

Till next time.