Re:Invent 2019 was a huge week, and apart from the Influenza I caught on the flight back, a great experience.
By the Numbers:
5 days
86.9 kilometers walked
23 pairs of socks
13 shirts
2 hoodies
27 pins
1 DeepComposer
Why did I go?
Although my company had already committed to attending ReInvent, I won the DeepRacer competition during the Sydney summit earlier in the year.
So I had two reasons to attend, the competition & the conference itself.
The Conference
I’ve been to Vegas before, but boy did I forget just how much walking I would be doing.
Apart from one day that I was ill, we walked almost 20kms each day.
The conference was spread across 4 main Casinos (MGM, Venetian, Aria & Mirage), with accommodation & after hours events taking place at many more along the strip.
We were staying at the MGM Grand (accommodation was generously provided by Amazon) likely due to the DeepRacer finals taking place at the MGM Grand Arena.
From my experience the majority of sessions I attended were hosted in the Venetian (along with the keynotes) & The Mirage, with workshops being run at the MGM.
Midnight Madness
Midnight Madness is the first event to kick the conference off. It began at 10pm on the Sunday night, places were limited so we were advised to line up early.
We arrived about an hour before the event kicked off and the line would’ve been over a kilometer long, snaking through the conference centre as far as you could see. Sure enough though, the line moved quickly and about 45mins later we walked through the doors to be greeted with popcorn & beer.
I had just assumed it would be a standard keynote affair - sit down, listen to some new announcements - leave. Well for starters, there wasn’t a chair in sight.
After I equipped myself with a beer, we went for a wander, and bumped into some mates that entered into Tatonka - a chicken wing eating contest.
Next to that, there was a group of guys performing basketball trick shots, and they were phenomenally good at it:
A little later on, it was time for the first product announcements for ReInvent (although PreInvent was a thing this year, with a number of announcements coming out before the conference).
Over the last few years a hardware product has been announced alongside a new AWS service, these included Deeplens & DeepRacer.
This year it was DeepComposer. Effectively a rebranded basic midi keyboard that is used to create a melody and submit to AWS’s generative AI model which then builds out the rest of the backing instruments.
A live demo was presented, and while I don’t think DeepComposer will be winning any Grammy’s anytime soon, it was certainly something I hadn’t seen before.
After the presentation the event wound down, Midnight Madness was a very different way to kick off any conference I’d ever been too!
GameDay
AWS GameDay is a half-day hackathon, this time based around Unicorn Rentals, a legendary animal rental market.
We were required to be in teams of 4, so myself and a colleague were paired up with two others.
The concept was a web store that rented out Unicorns, however it had a number of ‘issues’ that needed to be resolved leading up to Black Friday. These issues involved VPC configuration, Deploying code through CodePipeline, Lambda functions and more.
It was very interesting and fast paced, making for a fun team & skill building event.
Talks
I saw a number of valuable talks of the course of the conference, with some of my favourites listed below:
SVS402-R2
SVS401-R1
Swag
I still cannot believe how large the expo hall was at ReInvent, we had to go back 3 times to cover the expo, it absolutely dwarfed the Sydney summit.
It was a great opportunity to talk to a number of U.S based vendors about potential solutions, as well as… SWAG.
By the end of the conference I could barely close my suitcase, Socks seemed to be the thing this year, ending up with 23 pairs of them.
If you plan on attending ReInvent, pack very lightly, clothing is the least of your concerns.
The Race
Unfortunately due to workload leading up to ReInvent, I hadnt had much time to play with the new track and train more that one model.
However I had just as much time in Sydney and pulled off a win, so I was still looking forward to the race.
The day before the race there was a mandatory meeting / mixer for all competitors at the ARIA.
It was great to meet so many of the other competitors from around the world, once we all got a drink, the details of the knockout comp was announced.
There would be 4 groups of 16 competitors, with the top 4 in each grouping going through to the next round. Competitors would each have 4, 3 minute rounds at 4 different tracks (to account for enviroment variables).
The next day around Midday I headed down the the MGM Grand Arena and waited alongside the 15 others in my grouping.
Unfortunately there were a number of technical issues and our round was delayed by an hour, however once on the track I got used to the new model I had trained and the new track (this was the first time I had seen it in the flesh). Early on I ranked 5th or 6th in my grouping and felt positive about setting a faster time to just make it into 4th place.
If I had one piece of advice for the Deepracer league it would be this:
On the tablet used to control the car’s speed and start / stop. Do not put the up and down arrows directly above the stop button. This cost me a number of laps, as the track had a number of tighter curves compared to the summit tracks, I needed to slow down and speed up slightly to smooth out the car. As soon as I took my eyes off the tablet I kept accidentally hitting the stop button less than a finger’s width away from the speed controls.
Regardless of the tablet’s controls and some mechanical issues with one of my cars, I had fun and placed roughly midway in the total 64 competitors. A respectable placing for having so little prep time.
Congrats to Sola, winner of the league this year, I watched the finals and her model was exceptionally smooth!
Events
ANZ Welcome Reception
Down near the Stratosphere, I was invited to a Welcome Reception for Australian & New Zealand customers, a small event, but it was great to catchup with a number of the Brisbane team members that were in town attending ReInvent.
AWS Certification Appreciation
Of the two colleagues I was travelling with, one (Anthony) hadn’t sat an AWS exam before (a prerequisite for the event). So one week before flying out to Vegas I ran a crash course on everything needed to know to pass the AWS CCP exam.
Anthony sat the exam the day before the event and passed with flying colours, So we all wandered down to the Brooklyn Bowl - just outside of the LINQ casino.
The Certification Appreciation event was far more impressive than I expected, the food put on was great & both beer and spirits were made available. The venue had everything from 10 pin bowling to xbox’s setup throughout, unsurprisingly the place was packed.
Re:Play
The big one.
Re:Play was a mammoth setup, with 3 ‘hangars’ that housed the musical acts as well as a number of activities from button smash - a game where you race each other to hit to giant keyboard buttons fastest around a track, to the largest jumping castle I have EVER seen.
I was excited for the event as Anderson Paak was headlining, who ironically was the last artist I saw live in Australia a year earlier.
When we arrived A-Trak was playing, and he was really impressive. Because the Hangar (maybe 50m wide x 150m long) had lighting rigged up, it was a far more impressive light show than a normal festival stage.
One tip for heading to Re:Play is head to the swag tent straight away. This year they were giving out two different T-shirts, when we finally stumbled over to the tent the line was massive, thankfully it moved quickly though.
By far the most impressive part of the evening was the Intel Drone show.
At a guess at least 500 drones flew into the air and for about 3 minutes displayed different images & formations, it was so impressive I can see it replacing fireworks in the future.
Should you go?
Sure, if you can swing it.
For the Australian’s reading this, it’s identical to the annual Sydney summit, except it has 40,000 more people and it’s in Las Vegas.
Ok that’s not strictly true, from talking to a few of the speakers as well as my own personal experience, The best talks from summits all around the world are distilled and consolidated to the best of the best for ReInvent.
It’s worthwhile if you don’t mind the 16hrs of travel from Australia for a 5 day conference & you don’t mind crowds. I learnt alot and met some great people throughout the week, AWS really know how to host a conference!