This used to be one of the world’s largest conferences, with around 180,000 attendees in 2018. Hotel rooms in San Francisco had long been sold out – in at least one prior year, the organizers had docked a cruise ship at a city wharf to house attendees. I was asked at the last minute to do live social media about AWS’ participation in the event, but where I lived in Campbell was too far from the city to commute to the conference, so one of the AWS events staff gave up her hotel room for me (I suspect she was grateful not to have to attend).
You can see in the above photo how big the “campus” was. Somehow the events that I was supposed to cover had me running from the Intercontinental Hotel on one end to the Salesforce tower on the other. At least I wasn’t stuck inside a single conference hall the entire time.
Everyone seems to have advice about what potential employers and employees should look out for in the hiring process. Some of the suggestions for job seekers come from a position of privilege, and assume that you have multiple job offers to choose among. This was never the case for me, so I completely understand that advice may only be useful when you have choices. What follows is a tip I’ve seen elsewhere, which I share because I have had occasion to confirm it for myself.
I became one of a small cadre of people authorized to live-tweet from AWS-branded Twitter handles, including AWSonAir which is used for live coverage of major AWS events. My first assignment was VMworld, held that year in Las Vegas, where a big joint announcement was being made. If I recall correctly, this was the first time AWS had sent someone to do this kind of live coverage at a third-party event, though they had been covering AWS events for some time.
