Virtual AWS re:Invent 2019
Get the content without the Vegas trip expenses
AWS re:Invent is an awesome and inspiring experience that I recommend every AWS user go to at least once if possible. However, not everyone can attend due to cost, time commitment, or getting company approval. And shockingly, not all engineers love the crowds and lines associated with a 65,000-person conference spanning multiple venues across the Las Vegas strip. And even if you do attend, due to the massive session catalog, difficulties in getting reserved seats in your desired sessions, and managing the logistics of getting to your desired sessions when they are spread across multiple venues (with a mandatory one-hour buffer between sessions in different venues), you are lucky if you attend a dozen or so sessions.
While there is high value in experiencing the energy, networking, and getting to review lots of vendors by walking the expo floor, the conference is primarily billed as an educational opportunity with over 2500 unique session titles (3800 sessions in total due to repeats and overflows). Assuming that you invest about $4000 for the week, that’s over $300 per session. Fortunately, AWS records most sessions, making it possible for you to get many of the benefits of re:Invent without attending, or if you did attend, you can extend the experience beyond re:Invent week.
Watching session videos has a number of advantages. For example, you can watch when the topics are relevant (your needs and interests evolve throughout the year), you can watch in small and discontinuous fragments of time that fit your schedule, you can watch at a faster speed and can pause and rewind as needed, and you can watch as many sessions as you want without worrying about fitting into a tight schedule or about logistics for getting a seat or getting a bus to a venue.
We’ve created a version of our session catalog that is optimized for post-re:Invent use as a way to readily find relevant sessions and their corresponding videos.
However, just like re:Invent itself, there is a challenge in finding relevant sessions due to the sheer volume of content. Cloud Pegboard helped re:Invent attendees manage this by creating our own version of the re:Invent session catalog with several search and manageability improvements including ways to incrementally be notified and review additions as the catalog grew over time. We also provided a way to find sessions based on which AWS service they discussed, an attribute that is not otherwise available.
To help those of you who were not able to attend re:Invent, those that were but couldn’t attend all the sessions you wanted, or for anyone that might find need for the content throughout the year instead of all at once, we’ve created a version of our session catalog that is optimized for post-re:Invent use as a way to readily find relevant sessions and their corresponding videos. Just searching the internet for videos can be a frustrating and time-consuming experience. This is especially true since so many service names and topics use common terms such as “Personalize” and “Comprehend” and so on. Therefore, our catalog now presents a view that filters sessions to only those that have corresponding videos posted. Of course, you can see not just the title, but the abstract too, and then if interested a click takes you directly to the video. Other search methods such as keyword, topic, and session type are also provided.
To-watch list
A particularly handy feature is the ability to add/remove a session in our catalog to your wish list by just checking a box next to a session listing. This can be used as a to-do list for re:Invent video watching. You can easily filter your display to only show wish list (to-do) items. Each time you watch a video, just uncheck the session to remove it from your list.
Service datasheets link to relevant re:Invent videos
Cloud Pegboard users regularly rely on our service datasheets as a one-stop location to find out everything you’d ever want to know about an AWS service. One of the sections of a datasheet is a listing of re:Invent sessions that relate to the given service. Now that re:Invent is over, these items are now linked to the corresponding videos. This way, when working with a service, you have easy access to quickly find useful content that may be helpful to your current work with that service.
All too often valuable video content is recorded and posted, but never found (think warehouse scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark). We hope that by making re:Invent videos easily accessible and well organized, that we can unlock the value of the educational content from re:Invent to a broader audience over an extended period of at least a year instead of just a week.
UPDATE: Audio-only available too
We’ve now added the ability to download audio files for each session (where available). Just click on the speaker icon for a given session to download.
About Cloud Pegboard
Cloud Pegboard helps AWS practitioners be highly effective and efficient even in the face of the tremendous complexity and rate of change of AWS services. We want to keep AWS fun and feel more like dancing in a sprinkler on a hot summer day and less like being blasted with a firehose. We make the AWS information you need amazingly easy to access, and with personalization features, we help you stay up to date on the AWS services and capabilities that are important to you and your specific projects.
You might also be interested in the following related stories: AWS re:Invent — Fast Pass to Unannounced Sessions and Surviving the AWS re:Invent catalog.
