AWS re:Invent 2018 Swag Review
The Year of the Pin
After 2016’s first time swaggin’ haul and 2017’s “what am i going to do with 40 pairs of socks?” haul, I bring you re:Invent 2018 — The Year of the Pin.
A Cloud Guru had a booth at re:Invent this year, so I spent half my time giving out swag instead of collecting it this year which I love to do as well! If you came to our booth I hope you got some cool pins and a t-shirt!
I usually start with Amazon, but this year I’ll show you A Cloud Guru’s swag first. Behold, our pins, stickers, and T-Shirt — we gave out 1000 in 1.5 hours!
A Cloud Guru
Next up, the conference organizers!
Amazon
When you attend re:Invent, you get a hoodie — it’s like that every year. This we got this grey hoodies instead of the traditional black hoodie.
I’m not as huge of a fan compared to some of the cool hoodies from prior events. But hey, it’s free, so I ain’t complaining.
To go with the hoodie we also got a drink bottle to use around the event — awesome idea!
The certification team gave certified attendees a pretty cool hat, s’well bottle which is always awesome, and a glow in the dark binary t-shirt!
Amazon also had various other t-shirts available at the swag desk throughout the week.
They also gave out an AWS IoT powerbank which is pretty nice
and some pretty chime socks!
re:Play is the party at the end of the week which they usually give out 3 shirts ... this year it was just 2, and I managed to score myself a foam finger!
Those who attended the 4km/8km run (3rd year in a row for me!) got this shirt:
Over the past year a few friends and I have been working on the two AWS Quest challenges that the AWS blog team/evangelists put together. It was super fun and this year we scored some super rare swag from the organizers! Thanks Greg Bilsland!
Midnight madness happened again and we got to see Hiber announce the official launch of its nano-satellite powered solution. And we got a cool shirt to celebrate that!
The AWS marketplace booth in the expo also had some socks.
It’s probably time to mention #ExperienceAlexa, the little competition where you had to visit 3 different Alexa areas — at the AWS booth, at the front of the Expo hall and the Giant Echo.
People were RUNNING around trying to get this done as soon as they could after the expo hall opened, as they were giving out the new Echo Show, the Echo Plus and other echo related goodies.
I managed to score the Echo Plus and some Echo Buttons! These will come in handy for future episodes of Alexa Devs that I produce.
BEST SWAG AWARD
It’s a bit early in my blog post to award best swag, but this year it came from Amazon. I managed to score myself a DeepRacer in one of the first sessions after it was announced. This thing is seriously cool and I have no idea what I’m doing with it. :D
Coming in 2nd place for best swag was from Mission, where a reddit post before the event made me immediately search out the president to mention his reddit username to win a prize.
I ended up winning a choice between a DeepLens, an Echo Plus or an NES .. I chose the NES since I had the other 2 already! Thanks Tridente!
Moving on to other vendors, last year I got 40 pairs of socks. This year I wasn’t even trying and I still managed to come home with about 20 new pairs.
Dome9 had some cool unicorn headband and sword at their bar crawl venue
I got a photo with The Mountain (Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson) from Game of Thrones and a t-shirt from druva!
neqto had a pretty fan
Candid Partners had some tattoo sleeves
and various companies had LED bouncy balls, my kids love these things!
MongoDB with a bag
StackRox fidget cube
Armor bottle cosy
Sisense hot sauce
O’Reilly notebook
Devo post-it notes and various sticker things
Moogsoft cow
Salesforce always bring the goods and this year I got some socks and an awesome Tumbler.
Awesome beanie from xMatters!
Imperva had a nice deck of cards
Deloitte with a rubber ducky. Thanks Scott!
Dataguise with a BLANKET was pretty awesome!
And a few companies were giving out rubiks cubes this year.
Percona with the bottle opener — they said it’s good for beer. Thanks!
Capgemini had an artist who would draw you live at their expo booth!
And Qubole had an actual magic 8-ball
Sungard had a magician in their booth who was great, followed by a t-shirt and your very own 3 card monte trick set
WEIRDEST SWAG AWARD
In all my years .. this is just .. odd. If you went to the serverless booth in the AWS expo area and got a temporary tattoo .. then showed the swag desk .. you got a … are you ready for this?
… a spoon.
A serverless spoon which says “serverless for breakfast” on it.
Apparently I was the first person to ask for it … of course I was.
To conclude — we must discuss the pins.
YEAR OF THE PIN
Apparently this year amazon decided to give out pins, and they told the vendors to join in. And join in they did. I was going to post these individually but it was just too much effort. My total pin count was 143 from AWS and vendor booths.
The pin collecting was a lot of fun and some had really amazing designs! And I have to give mention to NS1 who posted me their pin from New York all the way to Australia just because I missed out! Thanks Jess!
When I started writing this blog post, I thought it would be pretty short because I felt like I didn’t try to collect as much swag this year — yet I still managed to fill a small suitcase. I didn’t spend any time trying to win stuff at various booths, though I heard some had some pretty awesome stuff, like Trend Micro with their smart luggage giveaway.
A friend who had a bit more time had a great haul, including winning a Nintendo Switch, an Apple TV and a bunch of Lego. Good job Justin!
Thanks for reading! I’m already looking forward to re:Invent 2019! How about you? What did you get? What was your favorite swag? Let me know in the comments below!
