First timer

A first-timer’s guide to AWS re:Invent

Roughly sixty thousand people, half a dozen venues, five days, and a catalogue with more sessions in it than you could attend in a month. Nobody does re:Invent well by accident, and almost nobody does it well the first time.

The advice below is the stuff people work out somewhere around Wednesday of their first year, when the week is already two-thirds gone. None of it is complicated. It is just that the conference is large enough that ordinary conference instincts — turn up, look at the board, wander in — quietly stop working.

Before you go

Reserve the moment reservations open

Session reservations open on a published date, weeks before the event, and the good ones — chalk talks, builders’ sessions, popular workshops — are gone in hours. Put the opening in your calendar, know what you want before you get there, and book fast. This is the single highest-leverage hour of your entire re:Invent.

Have a reason for going

“Learn about AWS” is not a plan; it is how you end up with nine hours of 200-level overviews you could have read the docs for. Pick two or three concrete things — a migration you are scoping, a service you are about to commit to, a problem you cannot solve — and let those choose sessions for you. Everything else is filler, and filler is fine, but it should know it is filler.

Book somewhere central

The Strip is long and the conference is spread along it. A cheaper room at the far end costs you a transit twice a day for five days. Do that arithmetic before you book.

Building the week

Under-book on purpose

The most common first-year mistake is a calendar with no gaps in it. A full calendar has no room for the walk, the queue, the conversation you get pulled into afterwards, or the thing you did not know you wanted until you heard about it on Tuesday. Leave holes. They will fill themselves.

Cut the recorded stuff first

Breakout sessions are recorded and posted publicly afterwards. Chalk talks and builders’ sessions generally are not. When two things clash, that is usually the whole decision — go to the one that only exists in the room. The formats are worth reading up on ; they matter more than the titles.

Respect the map

Two sessions back to back at different venues is not a schedule, it is a coin flip. The venues are kilometres apart , the walk inside each of them is longer than it looks, and the calendar does not know any of this. Anchor half-days to one venue and move between them once, not four times.

Know the walk-up line

A session showing no availability is not necessarily closed to you. Reserved seats are released to the walk-up line shortly before the start, and rooms very often have space. Turn up twenty minutes early and you will get into more than you expect. The corollary: a seat you reserved and arrive late for is a seat you have given away.

During the week

• Shoes over style. Ten to fifteen kilometres a day is normal. Take this one seriously; it is the difference between a good Thursday and a write-off.
• Drink water constantly. The desert plus the air conditioning plus the evening events dehydrate you faster than you will notice. Most of the people feeling terrible on Wednesday are simply dehydrated.
• Eat when food is in front of you. Breakfast and lunch are provided at the venues. Skipping them because you are busy means finding food on the Strip at a bad hour, which costs far more time than eating did.
• Give the expo a real slot. Not the fifteen minutes left over on Thursday. It is where the interesting conversations are, and there are lightning talks on the floor that make good filler.
• Take notes you can use in January. “Interesting” is worthless three weeks later. Write the action: what you will try, what you will change, who you need to talk to.
• Pick your evenings. There are more parties than there are evenings, and there is an 08:00 keynote with your name on it. Two good ones beat five mediocre ones.
• Do not fly out Friday morning. Or if you must, accept that you are skipping Thursday afternoon and plan accordingly rather than discovering it at the time.

Afterwards

Somebody paid for the ticket, the flight and the hotel, and they are going to ask what came of it. Write the trip report in the week you get back, while you still remember which session the good idea came from — actions first, context second. If you kept notes as you went, this is twenty minutes. If you did not, it is an afternoon of guessing.

The short version

Book early, book less than you think, know which sessions only exist in the room, respect the distances, drink water, and write things down. That is most of it.

SessionStack does the parts of that a person is bad at: it reads what you are after into filters, it will not let you book two sessions you cannot physically get between, it suggests something worth doing in every gap you leave, and it turns your notes and scores into the trip report at the end.