Adam: 00:00

This is weird, man. This is weird. This is weird to be, like, right next to you.

Dax: 00:04

I know.

Adam: 00:06

So we're in the same room. We're in the hotel room.

Dax: 00:08

This is in Vegas. It's a very special episode of tomorrow dot f m.

Adam: 00:34

It's special, but it's also like maybe the loosest definition of what this episode is gonna be about that we've had because it's like, we could talk about stuff that's happening at re:Invent. We don't really wanna do that. There's lots of people doing that. So we're gonna just talk about it's our first tech conference. But the first episode of this, we were booking sessions for this.

Adam: 00:52

Yeah. And we talked about how it's the first tech conference we've ever been at. Yep.

Dax: 00:56

So you're here. Episode.

Adam: 00:57

Yeah. It's a sequel. Yeah. We it's almost over. We're flying out tomorrow.

Adam: 01:01

You're leaving tomorrow. Right?

Dax: 01:02

Yeah. I'm leaving at noon.

Adam: 01:04

Okay. I'm flying out at, 5AM. Yeah. And that's maybe my first subject would be, like, going to a tech conference and the physical implications of that.

Dax: 01:12

Yeah. How do you feel physically right now?

Adam: 01:14

Actually, pretty good.

Dax: 01:15

Oh, it's good.

Adam: 01:16

I slept, like, ten hours last night. I got last night, I went to bed at 7PM Pacific. You're you're East Coast time, so you actually have had even worse than me all week. Yeah. But did you just, like, go to bed on time?

Adam: 01:27

Did you do something that I did not do?

Dax: 01:28

I've been this way my whole life. I just sleep like a rock no matter where I am.

Adam: 01:32

See, my wife would tell you I'm a really good sleeper or at least I fall asleep really easily all the time. But this whole week, I can't fall asleep. I can't stay asleep. I know why I took it so badly. I feel like there's always people from Europe that came in, people from Australia, they're like twenty hours behind their normal schedule and they all seem fine.

Adam: 01:49

And I'm like dragging myself through the expo hall. Don't know what I did wrong. If I just, I mean, we talked about it, we had some drinks. I might've been part of it. I haven't done that in three years.

Adam: 02:01

So maybe that's it. I haven't done anything like this in three years. I've gone to the grocery store and like been at home for three years straight. I don't think I've like gone to a thing at all, let alone a tech conference like this. Yeah.

Adam: 02:13

Sometimes my body's just completely unprepared.

Dax: 02:15

I mean, don't get me wrong. I don't feel great. But yeah. I think the thing that really threw me off was you think you're just gonna have a normal day, but you're just, you know, meeting people and stuff, but it's really hard to have anything close to a normal day. Like, was forgetting about my meals.

Dax: 02:30

I was eating breakfast. Like, I wasn't showering at the right time. Like, it's really hard to keep up with anything normal while you're at a tech conference of this size. Like, there's just stuff pulling you in a million directions and fitting in anything that you need just to stay alive is is kinda hard.

Adam: 02:45

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's your what's your just, first impressions of tech conferences in general?

Dax: 02:49

Yeah. I'm very surprised actually. So I've like we said, I've never been to one before. And the reason I had been to one is I'd never saw the value. I just thought I would be kind of bored the whole time, and I didn't.

Dax: 03:00

So I've never been to one. I was surprised because I ended up really liking it.

Adam: 03:03

Yeah.

Dax: 03:04

And my one of my takeaways is, oh, I should be trying to do this as much as I possibly can. And not because of any of the things you would expect out of a tech conference. Was kinda it kinda caught me entirely off guard. You know, you think you go, you listen to people talk, and, you know, that's the conference. But really, we didn't go to any sessions.

Dax: 03:20

So, me and Adam did not go to a single session the whole time we were here. All those things you saw us sign up for, we just did not Yeah. Not do. We spend all our time just hanging out, walking around, running into people that we only ever see online. I'm just talking to them in person.

Dax: 03:37

A lot of really cool people. It's great to see people's personalities in real life. It was just really fun. Like, you know, I haven't had this much social interaction in a very long time. And to be able to do that with people that I already kinda know from online that are all interested in all the same things.

Dax: 03:51

Yeah. It was a lot of fun.

Adam: 03:53

Yeah. Honestly, me, I felt like the last few years and they've just been like an exaggerated version of my whole career, which has always been remote, always been from home. But I feel like these last few years have been like this incredible amount of isolation and just like building anxiety. I've never felt so anxious on the internet or just in life. I think so much of it's just that only having digital interaction.

Adam: 04:14

Honestly, the thing I take away from this and I wanna go home with is like, I need to have more adult interaction. I need to find a way for my wife to have more adult interaction. It's just like, I haven't done this. And I mean, I feel like my whole working career kind of overlaps with my adulthood and so much of it is lacked. Something about this, like you said, it's not the tech conference stuff.

Adam: 04:33

It's none of the actual content of it. It's just like being around people who have interests that you have and just interacting with them in person. I was always like the biggest advocate of like remote from work from home, that stuff. I still am. But yeah, I want to do this more.

Adam: 04:46

And I didn't expect to come out of it being like, cause I don't like travel. Like, I've definitely done that in the past. I don't like a lot of the trappings of it and just the eating and all like we talked about, but just like something about the camaraderie and the hanging out with people. I gotta figure out how to do that living in the Ozarks. Like for my wife, somehow I know she would love that interaction.

Adam: 05:06

It feels like something was missing. Like there's a void.

Dax: 05:09

Yeah. And I don't really consider myself a super social person. I don't think you consider that either. So, same thing. I worked remotely my whole life.

Dax: 05:16

I didn't really feel like, oh, like this was a thing that I needed. But even as someone that's not a very social person, being here makes me realize, wow, like that is like a whole part of life that is just a misunderstanding. I don't think you notice it that much when you don't have it, but it is there's just something not there. Figuring out to get that in our lives more is definitely important.

Adam: 05:37

I don't want to go too deep and philosophical here, but I do think I've heard people say it's like community. It's like there's something in our society today just lacks something they had for all of humanity. Like all of societies have been built around this kind of communal living, not communal living, but like this sense of community and belonging to something. And while I felt like I had that, like you said, I didn't feel like I was missing it. Just the online nature of the tech community, it is different.

Adam: 06:05

It's different and I'll concede that.

Dax: 06:07

Yeah, there is like some biological thing where some part of your brain is activated when you see someone in person, and it's just not there when even through a video chat, whatever, it's it's not it's not there.

Adam: 06:17

Is it amazing to you how few people this is kinda shifting gears, but how few people you actually recognize, like, when you see them and when you've only seen them in their avatar or whatever?

Dax: 06:24

Yeah.

Adam: 06:24

Like, it actually takes a bit. Even people I've interacted with a lot. Like, I I thought I really knew what they would look like. It's just something about running into them in person. Totally different.

Dax: 06:32

Yeah. That's that's that was actually very hard. I feel like next year before I come to the conference, I need to, like, make a list of everyone and their avatars. Just, like, study it.

Adam: 06:39

So it's

Dax: 06:39

a good we had so many awkward moments where someone would come up and we'd be like, you look kinda familiar. And then we look at their name tag and their name tag would be facing the wrong way. And then we look back at them then figure it out. But, yeah, it's people look different in three d. That dimension really adds a lot.

Adam: 06:54

Yeah. I gotta say Corey Quinn didn't recognize me. That that was kind of a low moment for me. I just thought, like, we've interacted on the Internet. He's this big, like, AWS.

Adam: 07:02

I just thought I was gonna get I don't know. You've you've learned. I don't handle rejection. Maybe something you didn't see online. Yeah.

Adam: 07:13

What about the conference itself? Like, this one is a big one, I think, compared to other tech conferences.

Dax: 07:17

Like Yeah.

Adam: 07:19

What what are things you've learned that you wanna, like, take in next year?

Dax: 07:22

Yeah. I think everyone said to us that if we've never been to a tech conference before, this is a crazy one to start with because it is so big. I don't know if I can really put the words, but I'll try. Vegas is a big place. Every hotel is way bigger than any hotel you've been at.

Dax: 07:38

Just a single hotel you can get lost in for And that's not even the whole conference. They get reinvent covers several hotels. Each one is gigantic. There's people. And despite that, it's completely crowded.

Dax: 07:51

It's like rivers of people going around, really understood how big the AWS community is. I think 60,000 people are here. That number doesn't mean anything to us, but when you see it in person, it is really, really crazy. The scale of it, here is, is insane. And I don't think that, I don't know if there's any conferences as big, at least in the tech world outside of that.

Dax: 08:10

Yeah, in terms of what I, you know, what w what you should do at re:Invent, like we said, like I said earlier, we definitely underestimated. So the sessions are in different hotels and I think we book sessions not considering what hotels they were at. And because there are different hotels, you just don't want to leave. Like once you get to one hotel, it is a complete journey to get to another one.

Adam: 08:31

Just to get to the exit in the current hotel you're in is the whole journey that you just gotta go on.

Dax: 08:35

Make it to the parking lot is is hard. So we should have just booked sessions in the primary hotel, which is the Venetian. Mhmm. None of the sessions we booked were in Venetian. Yeah.

Dax: 08:43

Know. Which is why we didn't go to any of them. Next year, you know, try to book them in the same same hotel. Are you

Adam: 08:49

aware like, do other tech conferences have the same kind of a setup where it's basically, like, there's a keynote and there's a bunch of sessions? Is that re:Invent specific or is that?

Dax: 08:58

Yeah. I think I think most are so much smaller. They have like stages. Like they might have like two stages and then there's people going on.

Adam: 09:04

That's what I've seen on Twitter.

Dax: 09:05

Yeah. Exactly.

Adam: 09:06

They have somebody come up after the next person. They just keep going through them. Yeah. So this is unique. It's like every room in every hallway of this hotel has a session going on.

Dax: 09:15

Yeah. In parallel, like, the whole day.

Adam: 09:16

It's overwhelming. Yeah. But I might have popped into one if they were here at the Venetian and we could have just like, hey. That one sounds fun. Yeah.

Adam: 09:23

But I don't Next year, I don't know if I plan on even I I guess there's an advantage to prebooking even if you're not gonna go because you could. It's like optionality. Yeah. But, yeah, I don't think we missed anything not going to sessions. I feel like No.

Adam: 09:35

The meeting people, the hanging out with people Yeah. That was the thing.

Dax: 09:38

Yeah. We the main thing is, like, find a place to park where you see people coming through pretty often and then just stay there and you end up running against everyone. Yeah. That's what we did in. It worked out really well.

Dax: 09:48

What'd you think about the expo?

Adam: 09:50

It's a lot visually. Like, it's kind of over what just you wanna set the stage a little bit? It's just like all these boots, but I guess they'd probably do that at other tech conferences. Maybe not on this scale.

Dax: 10:00

Just just it's like the biggest warehouse room you've ever seen. Massive. Like, it would take you, like, ten minutes a walk from one end to the other. Just walking pretty fast. Probably more than that, to be honest.

Dax: 10:10

And it's just packed with these boots and different size boots. Know, you have to your normal. And the size is still pretty expensive. I think we were talking to some of the people and they were saying the smallest booth you can get there, which is like half of one side of a booth is 50 k.

Adam: 10:25

We're talking like three feet wide, four feet wide. It's just a little kind of like place for a laptop.

Dax: 10:29

Yeah, exactly. The smallest thing you can possibly get. And then the biggest ones are like a million for the booth. So, a huge room with all these things and some companies go all out and have these crazy setups with these lights and projectors and their logo and like these games and all this crazy stuff.

Adam: 10:46

Yeah. There's a Datadog slide. That's not on the expo, but it's like a slide going down a floor.

Dax: 10:51

We still have which we didn't do.

Adam: 10:52

No, we didn't do that. Yeah. I think they only had it open certain times.

Dax: 10:55

Yeah. And there's always a line.

Adam: 10:56

Yeah. Yeah. It's just a lot of people. I just haven't been around so many people maybe ever, but definitely not in a long time.

Dax: 11:03

It is surprising that despite how many people there are, we were just running into people we recognize at time. Like 60,000 people, we probably knew like 50 of them maybe. I think we found all of them and it wasn't that hard.

Adam: 11:14

It's Yeah, that's something I remember saying to you pretty early in the conference is like, all at the same time, I couldn't have ever believed that the AWS community was this big or that there's this many people that care. Because it's like, this is just a fraction of the whole community, the people who are willing to fly to Vegas from wherever they live. So it makes this AWS community feel so much bigger than I think it is when I'm hanging out on Twitter. But at the same time, that group that hangs out on Twitter feels so much smaller than I realized. It's this weird dichotomy where I simultaneously feel like more people are interested in this thing than I realize and maybe less people because of the niche.

Adam: 11:48

The little thing we care about in AWS community is this every tinier part of it. Right. Yeah.

Dax: 11:54

Yeah. And, you know, the zone we were hanging out in was the serverless zone, but it wasn't even called the serverless zone. Was called the modern application zone. It was combined with the Kubernetes stuff. So, it was, yeah, a very small community.

Dax: 12:05

But I guess that's what makes it fun. Right? We we know everyone in our space and Yeah. We all know what we're we're thinking about and talking about.

Adam: 12:11

Yeah. Yeah. So, you don't feel awful. I feel really, like, physically

Dax: 12:16

I mean, I'm definitely ready to go home. Like, I have not showered correctly in a while. I just don't feel clean.

Adam: 12:22

Feel I it's accumulated don't

Dax: 12:26

know. I just like my shower at home and anywhere else. I'm just like, this is not a good shower. I like

Adam: 12:31

everything at home and everything feels foreign. The food, the shower, the bed, just all of it. Sleep with it. Do you use it? This is random.

Adam: 12:40

No one's gonna care about this. Do you use like one of the bed coolers?

Dax: 12:44

Yeah, do. An Ooler? No, have an Eight Sleep.

Adam: 12:47

Oh, that's the one that's like goes into the mattress. Right?

Dax: 12:50

Yeah. Well, it's it's almost like cover that goes over the mattress, but it's a

Adam: 12:53

But you buy the whole mattress from them. Right?

Dax: 12:55

I got a crazy lucky situation. Someone in my building when I lived in New York, had bought one And very quickly, they had to get, like, a doctor prescribed mattress because they had some back issue. So they sold it to me for $500, the whole setup. It only costs, like, $3. Yeah.

Dax: 13:10

But, yeah, it's very nice. So, yeah, I do use one of those things.

Adam: 13:12

Makes it impossible to sleep at a hotel.

Dax: 13:14

Exactly. I try I turn mine down all the way. Can't use myself at If

Adam: 13:17

you're used to that, like, cool to the touch all night and then you get in one of these, it's just I sweat the whole thing. Like, the bed is just have to keep rolling to different sides of it till I find a cold spot. Yeah.

Dax: 13:28

Yeah. We're princesses. So I guess

Adam: 13:29

that was hard for us. A little extra.

Dax: 13:33

Are your tips for Well,

Adam: 13:35

people coming to one, I think just overall, I do recommend it. I recommend coming to the If you've ever been on the fence and you're like And I know people have it harder, like having to fly from Europe. I can't pretend to say, I know it's gonna be worth it for you. But for me coming in kind of skeptical, like 100% worth coming. And to your point, like I would like to find more tech conferences to go to because we do have other interests that are not just AWS and reinvent.

Adam: 14:02

So I definitely wanna find other opportunities to travel, to hang out with a bunch of like minded people. That's not really a tip, just kind of like if you're on the fence. In terms of tips for this, because this is all I know about tech conferences, I would have come more prepared. I I maybe I don't know, like, how I could fix the food situation. It's like you're just eating out the entire time for a whole week here.

Adam: 14:23

And I don't know. I guess most tech conferences aren't a whole week. That's kind of part of the Yeah. What can I do to make the sleep situation better? I would just I would make myself I would come in with like a very strict schedule for myself.

Adam: 14:38

Like, I'm always going to go to bed by this time and I would not deviate from that. Like I think I didn't realize somebody said it last night when I was like, I could clearly visibly, I was like exhausted at 07:00 and I'm walking out of the hotel to go to the next one to go to bed. And the guy said, it's a marathon, not a sprint. And I would have like come in with that mentality that you gotta make it through the whole week without physically being exhausted. I didn't even walk that much.

Adam: 15:01

I thought like everything I heard leading up to it, people would have like 20,000 steps and it's like you walk constantly. I guess those are people that are going to the other hotels.

Dax: 15:08

Yeah. Exactly. We stood a lot. We were standing like the whole week.

Adam: 15:11

So it's pretty sedentary. Ate pretty terribly. And a lot of that's just self control. Slept terribly and just didn't go to bed at good times. So I would fix all those things.

Adam: 15:20

And that's my tip is like, take care of your physical self. So you can actually, like, make it through the whole conference without just being exhausted.

Dax: 15:27

Yeah. I think another random thing, bring ChapStick.

Adam: 15:30

Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's so dry.

Dax: 15:32

Vegas is so dry. There's so many people everyone's, like, coughing. People are just getting nosebleeds. All of our lips are just chapped completely.

Adam: 15:39

Yeah.

Dax: 15:39

Yeah. Datadog was giving out, Datadog branded chapstick, which, you know, they've been here a bunch of times. Clearly, they know they know what you need.

Adam: 15:47

Yeah. That's like three d chess right there. They were they were prepared. If they would have had little ocean bottles, think that would have been the next move. Yeah.

Adam: 15:54

The on the coughing note, how I mean, what do you think, like, twenty twenty two now? What is the percentage of us that are going home and taking COVID?

Dax: 16:02

Well, everyone says that, and I fully expected this, that we're going to get some kind of you go home and you're kind of sick. I really don't want that to be the case. Like, I have a lot of work. Don't want to be sick right now. I think it's bound to happen.

Dax: 16:15

We'll see. If we get lucky, we're not going to get it. I'm convinced, like, the next whatever the next pandemic thing is is going to start here.

Adam: 16:21

At a tech conference.

Dax: 16:21

Yeah. So, if we get something, it might be, the next COVID whatever

Adam: 16:24

is. I mean, they had enough time and enough people at this place to mutate into something completely

Dax: 16:28

different. Exactly.

Adam: 16:30

It didn't really, I tried to explain it to my wife, just like describe it visually. Just the number of people at all times, like a river going both directions, everywhere you are in this hotel, every hallway is just completely packed. You're like cattle, which is really interesting too. Today, the keynote, Werner gave his keynote and they had like this whole slide and this whole thing on the big video display of all the birds like swarming around. He talked about like, did you see that?

Dax: 16:53

Yeah, did see that.

Adam: 16:54

Yeah, and I just, I thought about it at the conference how humans are really good at that. Yeah. Exactly. We do somehow like move together really well. Yeah.

Adam: 17:01

But yeah, I don't know. I think I will come back. I think it's it's worth coming to. I think I don't know what the next thing. I guess React Miami.

Adam: 17:08

You're gonna be.

Dax: 17:08

Yeah. That one's gonna be easy for me because I get to go home.

Adam: 17:11

Yeah. That's easy. Yeah. You live in Miami.

Dax: 17:13

Sleep in my bed.

Adam: 17:14

Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay. I'm moving to Vegas. I'll be ready for next re:Invent.

Adam: 17:18

Get the family acclimated.

Dax: 17:19

Just optimize your whole life around this one week. Yeah. Right.

Adam: 17:24

Are there any what time when is React Miami? Like, I wanna come to that one is

Dax: 17:28

It's in April.

Adam: 17:29

Oh, I thought it was way sooner.

Dax: 17:31

No. It's in mid April. So you have time to decide if you wanna go. Yeah. Yeah.

Dax: 17:35

But that it's like way I mean, it's a whole week because it's a it's not React Miami isn't a whole week, but there's a Miami Tech Week thing. And a bunch of people come in for that. There's a few different conferences going on at the same time. And React Miami is actually inside of a bigger conference. It's like a part of a bigger conference.

Dax: 17:51

I think it's only I mean, just one or one or two days. It seems extremely well run. I saw videos from last year. Oh, that's another thing. Reinvent insanely well run.

Dax: 18:00

Oh, wow. Yeah. They coordinate so much. Like every nook and cranny of Vegas has something Reinvent going on and it's all super, super well done. All the people doing logistics and coordination, I know that they're maybe gonna take a week off next week, then they're back to planning the next

Adam: 18:14

week because

Dax: 18:15

I can't imagine the amount of work this takes.

Adam: 18:17

It's insane, actually. Amazon's really good at executing just in general. Even though a lot of people move around within the AWS organization or they leave the company or whatever, everything stays so stable with AWS products and like how they're not, they don't break things, it's all that. Like stuff that's in contrast to the other cloud providers. And I have to think it's just like the Amazon culture works.

Dax: 18:37

Yeah.

Adam: 18:38

And it trickles into things like conferences where you can just see they're very good at stuff and they execute very well. It would take so much to coordinate this thing and to not have any major hiccups. There was not a single I know they've done it like eleven years, but like not a single hiccup, Even at the smaller level, like, the individual booths we hang out, like, those are so well ran and and just, like, taking care of things that you would think, like, we that we wanted, you know, just, having a place to go hang out that's quiet and to get something to drink and eat. And they're just thinking of everything at the little level and at the big level.

Dax: 19:07

Yeah. And they don't fully control everything. They control what they do, but they're coordinating all the vendors and all the guests and everything and just wrangling everyone, everyone together. That stuff is very hard. I've done a little bit of that at a small scale and it it is difficult.

Adam: 19:18

I do feel like going to other other tech conferences would not be as smooth as this one felt. Like, feel like we're we're pretty spoiled.

Dax: 19:24

Yeah. Good first one to compare everything else to.

Adam: 19:27

Yeah. Exactly. Except the bars. Alright. You got anything else on this?

Dax: 19:31

No. I think we're good.

Adam: 19:32

Okay. It was cool to do it in person. This is nice. Yeah. We'll just we'll just do this every time.

Dax: 19:36

I'm gonna fly to your house Yeah. For every episode.

Adam: 19:38

We can alternate. I'll I'll come down to Miami. Okay. I'll bring the whole family. Alright.

Adam: 19:44

Did that end it? No. No.

Dax: 19:45

That last part. I think that it was fine.

Adam: 19:47

Oh, wait. No. No. No. Fifteen seconds.

Adam: 19:48

We got fifteen seconds till it's twenty minutes. Let's keep talking. I could play some music for fifteen seconds at the end, but let's just keep talking. I'm gonna cut I'm gonna cut all this out, and then it's gonna be, nineteen minutes and twelve seconds. Okay.

Adam: 20:00

It's fine.

Dax: 20:01

Oh, wait. Wait. We did it. Okay. Nice.