Snowflake Summit 2025

First Snowflake Summit, and the first time I had been to San Francisco. The city you hear about constantly if you work in tech for long enough. Being there in person, at a conference that felt like it was running in the middle of it, was a different kind of experience.

Compared to AWS re:Invent, this conference felt more focused. The attendees were there for a reason. You could tell from the conversations at the booth and in the hallways that people had specific problems they were trying to solve, not just collecting swag and attending keynotes. The scale of the data industry was also something to observe up close: not just Snowflake, but dozens of companies and startups building on top of the platform, each with their own booth and pitch. Datadog Summit was happening the next week just down the road. A startup that builds a competing data product had set up a coffee truck right outside the venue entrance since they were not permitted inside. Guerrilla marketing works.

LocalStack was at Snowflake Summit for the first time. Five of us ran the booth: Waldemar Hummer (CTO), Gerta Sheganaku (COO), Brian Rinaldi (who heads Developer Relations and is my manager), Przemek Denkiewicz (one of the lead developers on our Snowflake emulator), and me. What we were showing was the Snowflake emulator: a fully local Snowflake environment that lets you develop and test data applications before they touch a real cloud account. I had built a Snowflake smart factory sample application specifically for the conference to demonstrate what a full local development loop looks like end to end.

The reception was strong. One of the founding engineers of Snowflake came by for a demo, around the time of the Snowflake 1.0 GA release, and spent real time going through what we had built. That kind of attention from someone who had been there from the beginning of the product meant a lot. By the end of the week, we had scanned over 800 leads.

The after-party was a good way to close it out. Unlike AWS re:Play, which tends toward spectacle, this one was about conversations. People were actually interested in talking: where they worked, what they were building, what they were trying to figure out. We played games with people we had met at the booth, talked to engineers from companies we had only known by name, and just got a better sense of the ecosystem we want to be a long-term part of.

San Francisco lived up to most of it. Not all of it. But most of it.