AWS re:Invent Agenda for Humans
With hundreds of sessions spread over 3 weeks and multiple time zones, here’s how to plan your path efficiently.
UPDATE: On November 19th we added about 1800 sessions to the catalog following AWS’s release of the breakout sessions. We also now have filters for language and various other enhancements that help find and schedule your virtual re:Invent experience.
Like everything else this year, AWS re:Invent will be radically different than in the past. This year it will be a virtual event spanning 3 weeks (November 30 — December 18) and following the sun with repeat sessions aligned with 3 timezones (PST, SGT, GMT). Certainly I’ll miss all the great ad hoc conversations and meeting new people that have been the highlight of previous in-person re:Invents. On the other hand, this necessary new format has some distinct benefits.
For starters, re:Invent is free for all and there is no travel required. This will radically change the number of people who will be able to participate. Few of us will miss the intense rush to reserve seats for popular and less popular sessions alike. In 2019, the vast majority of sessions were fully booked within about 60 seconds of the opening of registration. (I’d insert a reference to getting tickets to one of my favorite rock concerts, but anything I write will pathetically date me.) And of course if you didn’t get into a session you could wait in line for an hour and maybe get in on standby or maybe not. Another benefit of a virtual event is that we won’t have to spend half of our time taking busses from venue to venue as is now the norm as the conference has grown.
While a virtual event avoids many of the logistic challenges of previous in-person conferences, with hundreds of sessions spread over multiple timezones, planning your experience still has some challenges. The main AWS: re:Invent site (register there) has an agenda that lets you see the schedule based on one of three time zones (PST for the “Americas”, SGT for “Asia-Pacific”, and GMT for “Europe”). This is fine if you happen to be in one of those time zones, but for the rest of us, this can be a planning challenge. Yes, I can add, but it’s a pain when trying to plan for many events over 3 weeks. Moreover, there is no way to add the events that you want to attend to your calendar.
To help with your planning, I’ve created an AWS re:Invent Agenda for Humans, a free site that presents the agenda that is automatically adjusted for your local time zone. This means you don’t need to translate times in your head. It also means that you can easily choose to plan to attend sessions in regions other than your local region since you might want to attend at night to avoid conflicts with any daytime obligations that you may have (few employers are likely to give you 3 weeks off to attend a virtual conference). It’s stupid simple in concept, but I think that you’ll find it to be remarkably useful.
The data is presented in a searchable, sortable, and filterable table so that you can more efficiently find what you are looking for. When you find sessions that you might want to attend, just click on the check box to add it to your personal wishlist. Once you’ve built a wishlist, you can then use a single click to bulk export a CSV file that is formatted to allow you to bulk import your entire wishlist into a Google Calendar.
AWS has and will update the agenda up to the start of the conference and possibly during as well. To help keep track of what’s new (and changed) so that you don’t need to continually browse the catalog to hopefully notice new or changed events, you can just sort by the “updated” field in the table to see what has changed recently and ignore everything that you’ve previously reviewed.
As I did last year, once the conference is over, the same catalog of sessions will become a searchable list of recorded content. You can then use the wishlist feature as a reading list (filter by wishlist to see your list; uncheck each session after you view the recording). This recording catalog can be quite useful since you can spread your consumption of content out over time and when it is most relevant to you. And of course, watching a recording gives the ability to optimize your time by watching at faster playback speeds.
I hope that you find tool this wildly useful and pragmatic. Please help by sharing broadly since I have limited social reach and the planning aspect of the tool has a very short shelf life if we want the community to get maximum benefit.
AWS re:Invent Agenda for Humans: https://cloudpegboard.com/reinvent2020
Have fun!
Ken
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