It was nice to be able to go to an industry event. It was certainly a large crowd, 3500 attendees! As usual, the attendees were mostly male. The good side of that was having no queues at the toilets for the ladies. The women were fairly represented on the speakers side though which is quite refreshing to see.
As usual, it was pretty much a marketing event talking and selling in products. I did appreciate hearing the customers stories on how they are using AWS platforms. 10 years ago, the idea of platform as a service was hard to grasp, now we have AI and Machine learning as a service. What’s even more amazing is how any developer can use these through APIs. It’s very exciting what apps and solutions will come out of all this development: from human genome data processing to identifying guests at the royal wedding. Platforms like these certainly can speed up innovation.
I think it’s great that platform vendors are even making all this technology accessible to people to try out for a period of time, and giving free access to students as well. Hopefully this lowers the barrier for problem solvers around the world to finding and building solutions that will benefit all of us in the future.
being in tech 