AWS re:Invent 2023

AWS picked me for the All Builders Welcome grant for re:Invent 2023, which covered the full trip. First time at the conference, and LocalStack's first time running a booth there.

The booth setup was new ground for all of us. My main job was demos: explain what LocalStack does, show the product in action against a local cloud environment, and hand off to whoever was managing the badge scanner. I ran that loop over 150 times across four days. You get good at reading a person quickly when you are doing it at that volume. Some got it in 30 seconds. A few needed three minutes and still left uncertain. Most landed somewhere in the middle, and several came back the next day with specific questions, which was a good sign.

The grant also came with a structured program: sessions and networking with other All Builders Welcome recipients from across the world. A good number of them were from India, which made for some good conversations on the side.

The conference itself is a lot to take in. The convention center is genuinely disorienting at that scale, sessions overlap constantly, and the city outside has nothing to do with what is happening inside the venue. That said, running a booth for the first time, clocking 150-plus demos, and meeting people who were actually curious about what we were building made the four days worth it.