6 lessons from a team trip to re:Invent
by Nathalie Godec, Platform Engineer at Babylon Health
This December, Las Vegas welcomed a delegation of 10 engineers from Babylon Health attending AWS re:Invent — one of the biggest tech conferences in the world. With 65000 attendees, 5 venues and countless meetings, workshops and parties, AWS re:Invent was the perfect opportunity for Babylon Engineering to learn, network and grow. It was my first trip with the team, and the 5 days of the conference were insanely intense — and insanely inspiring too. Here are the 6 lessons we’ve learned during our team trip to AWS re:Invent.
1. Talks are great, workshops are better, customer meetings are priceless
The very first session I was booked into was about migrating Kafka to an AWS managed solution, MSK. I knew very little about Kafka, so you can only imagine how deep my heart sank when I entered the room set up for a workshop, and realised I was in for 2 hours of working on something I’d never worked on before. Nevertheless, I was very eager to learn, my colleague leading our Data Ops team — an expert in all things Kafka related — was there, and the workshop turned out to be brilliantly set up. There was a small presentation, several labs prepared just for this workshop, with detailed instructions and materials prepared for us, and a few AWS engineers in the room, ready to help. Needless to say it was one of the best sessions I’ve attended throughout the whole week.
We also had several customer meetings with AWS teams — ML labs, “two pizza team”, using Spot instances, cost reduction etc. Having a focused, organised discussion with a couple of specialists, where you can ask the exact questions you need and get experienced advice — is one of the most valuable interactions out there. And a conference such as re:Invent, with 65000 attendees, is likely to have just the right teams present from the vendors you work with. These are private sessions only available to select customers from AWS, and our AWS account manager was invaluable in giving us those opportunities.
2. Divide & Conquer
Las Vegas is massive. Things are further away from each other than you think. Venetian and Mirage are just across the road, yet it takes precisely 23 minutes to walk from one conference venue to the other. So what we did when the schedule was announced was booking seats at the different sessions, such that 1 person or a small group would be in 1 hotel on each day. This allowed us to stay more concentrated, and also to cover a larger number of topics.
3. Health Tech is moving fast
As an AI-driven Health Tech company, we naturally pay a lot of attention to any advancements in this domain. And re:Invent brought a number of announcements, events, and keynotes that made us both excited and aware of the speed with which the healthcare sector is moving.
A section of the keynote was dedicated to the achievements of an American Health Tech company in building a model able to predict hospital readmission. This kind of development is enabled by the whole industry converging on standards like FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) and by the increasing availability of highly sophisticated data processing tools.
Following the keynotes there were a number of sessions covering Amazon Comprehend Medical were added following the keynotes. Amazon Comprehend Medical a service that can extract structured medical entities from text, and Amazon Transcribe Medical, which extends the process to speech.
Overall, re:Invent made it clear that all of the advancements in ML and healthcare-related technologies by AWS make the cloud a compelling path to go for healthcare organisations. We at Babylon Health are in the lucky position of being a cloud native company, and member of CNCF, and as such is perfectly positioned to leverage these technologies to our advantage.
4. Engineers are, essentially, 4-year-olds
Have you ever watched people at a meetup, or a conference expo? It’s usually what my husband calls a “geek gathering”, but then there are these few moments where the velocity of the crowd jumps up and you can hear some exclaim “Stickers!” or “Pizza!”.
Between getting all the stickers at the expo, and exploring the laws of physics by creating a tornado in the hotel’s swimming pool, we couldn’t help but notice how similar to children engineers sometimes are.
5. Team building is best done at the pool
Great conversations in a novel environment take you to ideas you’d never considered.
Besides creating tornados (which can also only be done when everyone is working together as a team), we discussed the challenges in managing our Kubernetes clusters, future projects and the shiny new services announced at the keynotes. Of course, the pool here is just an example that we happened to have, but we all agreed that being put together in a very different — and, arguably, relaxing — environment made for some very productive discussions.
Similar to companies like Hashicorp and Expensify that have embraced the idea of remote working and have their staff gather in a special location once a year.
Another moment I noticed is the explosive creativity that emerges when you cross the boundaries of your own daily work. Our group had engineers from different teams, squads and tribes, which enabled us to come up with ideas that wouldn’t cross our minds otherwise. In EPFL, the university I went to, the main focus during the Masters’ admissions is the diversity of minds. They say that if you want to find the best engineering solution possible, you need to put together people from different backgrounds, cultures and countries, and they will suggest things that you would never think of.
6. Sharing is caring
The 10 of us were very lucky and privileged by the experience. Attending all those sessions allowed us to learn a lot, and truly resonated with our belief that our mission deserves the best possible engineering solutions, and that these are born in the community, not in the finite space of our offices. But the sharing doesn’t need to stop here. When we came back from re:Invent, we all organised lunch sessions, blogs or any other format to share what we have learnt beyond our experience in Vegas itself.
Practical advice if you are planning to go next year:
- Stay in a smaller hotel on or just off the strip, in a walking distance from one of the venues. We stayed at the Platinum Hotel & Spa and that really worked for us.
- Shuttles are running from each hotel’s conference center. Walking from Aria to Venetian past lunchtime is faster than taking the shuttle
- MGM Grand is, well, grand
- Organize yourselves to book sessions as soon as seat reservations open. I mean as soon as — some were fully booked within the first minute of opening
- 300 and 400-ranked sessions tend to be more appealing to engineers that run AWS infrastructure in prod; however, some of the 200 (intermediate) sessions were detailed, focused and gave us a lot of deep knowledge on the tools we work with every day.
- More sessions will be added after the keynotes — when new tech is announced, and places for existing sessions will also free up with people going to the new unlocked session. Make sure to refresh your schedule regularly and at the very least after every new keynote.
- Stream the keynotes from your hotel or go to one of the overflow spaces. Getting in and out of the live keynote takes really, really long.
- If you have a contact at AWS or any other brand at the conference — ask for customer meetings with them! They might have just the right team representatives to go through the challenges you are facing and give advice
- Go to as many organised drinks as you can — networking is key
- Your AWS team and the quality of your integration with them is key. If they know and care about your business, they’ll be able to schedule all the right sessions for you. In our case, they were amazing and even got us on stage at re:Invent (check it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULlqukKVKBo), and got our director to take part in media contributions.
- General Vegas advice: carry your passport with you. Not all places accept non-US issued IDs other than a passport.
At Babylon we believe it’s possible to put an accessible and affordable health service in the hands of every person on earth. The Technology we use is at the heart and soul of that mission. Babylon is a healthcare platform, currently providing online consultations via in-app video and phone calls, an AI Assisted Triage and Predictive Health Assistance.
If you are interested in helping us build the future of healthcare, please find our open roles here.
Follow us on Twitter @Babylon_Eng
