Forem: Shandrew

AWS re:Invent 2025 Quirky Events: A Serious Assessment

Shandrew — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 10:15:27 +0000

AWS re:Invent 2025 is coming up in one short week. There's no shortage of quirky events on the schedule--many new for this year. Which will you choose? As an eleven-time re:Invent veteran, I can help figure out which can fit into your schedule:

Road to re:Invent
"Watch technical debt accumulate in real-time, now with live commentary"

House of Kiro
"Haunted by ghosts of AWS Q features nobody understood"

The Fragrance Lab
"Making scents of your AI inputs"

Tattoos & Piercings
"Immutable infrastructure applied to human flesh"

Rock, Paper, Scissors
"Distributed systems education disguised as playground warfare"

Ride the Slide
"Vertical scale-down in its most literal form"

Magic the Gathering
"Gamify your resource management"

Ice Barr Trivia
"Cold storage you can actually afford to retrieve from"

Bingo After Dark
"I4 is finally a bingo square*, not an instance type"

AWS re:Invent 5K Race
"No health checks beyond 'do you feel like running?'"

Amazon's World Famous Chicken Wing Eating Competition
"The only AWS event where throughput metrics are visible, measurable, and deeply uncomfortable for everyone involved"

For a complete list of these, and an actual excellent way to plan out your re:Invent schedule, check out AWS Community Builder Raphael Manke's RIV Planner:
https://reinvent-planner.cloud/

* Yes, I know that I4 cannot be a legit bingo call
** Yes, I am not good at humor. Yet.

I revived ValleyRAG in PartyRock to find the rumors behind OpenAI CEO's firing. LLMFAO!

Shandrew — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 10:59:28 +0000

TL;DR: Meet "I'm Feeling Dirty", the new ~~Valleywag~~ ValleyRAG, written in the shiny, awesome, free, PartyRock (PartyRock, an Amazon Bedrock Playground):
https://partyrock.aws/u/a/Nl0ezJuPZ/%22I'm-Feeling-Dirty%22

Read what our "journalists" had to say about OpenAI's ouster of Sam Altman:

The Silicon Valley rumor mill today is HOT with talk of former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's departure, after being fired by OpenAI's board of directors. Company Slacks everywhere are brimming with chatter about what could cause a company to declare that it "no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI" for their CEO who grew them from a ~15B to ~80B company in three years as its leader. With Altman's firing, OpenAI's board chair/president/cofounder Greg Brockman abruptly quit. With his departure OpenAI's board is now down to four people and is unlike any corporate board of a company this size--OpenAI is a non-profit (sort of).

What a day. But to top it all off, no one expected this to happen. Journalists in the middle of all-things-tech like Kara Swisher and Casey Newton were caught surprised (for what it's worth, so was Greg Brockman!). What I found missing were the ultra-"creative" works, like the tech versions of the TMZs and even National Enquirers of the world. We used to have Valleywag, F*ckedcompany, and so on, to make up crazy things about the tech world and occasionally find some bitter truths. Today there's still Blind, and a rapidly dying Tw*tter, but I still felt a gaping void. Where can we look next?

Welcome, our generative AI robot overlords, working through Amazon's Bedrock service, all made simple and free by PartyRock.

In about one minute, from URL opening to getting a news story out, I created an app in AWS' new PartyRock service. I used a quick, plain language prompt of Ask for the name of a few tech companies. Use those tech company names to generate tabloid-like fictional news stories about rumors relating to those companies. It should be similar to Valleywag, F*ckedcompany, or The Register in writing style. The app was ready! I entered my input in the "companies" field as "Microsoft, OpenAI", and out came popped news story.

It didn't do exactly what I wanted.

I desired more dirt, so I altered the field-embedded prompt to include some potential topics of interest and journalistic styles that might work. I set the model to Jurassic as the Claude model objected to toothy rumor-mongering. I added a fun generated image that is built from a concatenation of the user input, the LLM output, and my additional context.

My new ValleyRAG can be tested here. Sign in with any Amazon, Apple, or Google account, and you can try it now! You've probably already tried out AI tools like ChatGPT that let you talk to a large language model in the form of a chatbot, where you type some inputs, and get responses from the LLM.

PartyRock takes generative AI apps to the next level, while maintaining the simplicity you have in something like a chatbot interface. Beyond chatbots, the advantages PartyRock has are:

a basic input and output model -- you can have multiple inputs and feed them into an LLM, or even feed your LLM output into another LLM or image generator.
The app model is remarkably simple and intuitive. My children made a fun app in a single descriptive command! Their app could have been simplified in a chatbot, but putting things into a multipanel UI rather than a single scrolling chat makes a big difference.
LLMs that you can choose! Different models have different advantages--some are faster to run, some more detailed, some more creative. By the way, PartyRock does not call them LLMFAOs.
SHARING! If there's one big thing I'd like to scream to the rooftops about, it's sharing! For a year, people have been sharing ChatGPT discussions by screenshotting them (is the jpeg industry behind this??). Eventually ChatGPT released a "Share link to chat" feature, but it's slow, clunky, buggy--and most importantly, others cannot reuse your chat. In PartyRock, you can share links to Apps, share links to Snapshots which are Apps with pre-filled fields, and it's glorious! You can view publicly shared apps, see exactly how they work, and remix them to make your own app.
Education. ChatGPT taught us that LLMs have reached a point where they are useful and can communicate competently in natural language. PartyRock teaches us that Gen AI puts the ability to create useful, fun, no-code apps into the hands of people with zero experience. For those of you with a more technical bent, PartyRock will open your eyes to what's possible with a LLMs, some natural language prompting/context, and a very simple API (what Bedrock and other providers offer).

To sum up, here's what you should do to read ValleyRAG, or to write your own version of it:

Sign in to PartyRock
Open up my ValleyRAG app at https://partyrock.aws/u/a/Nl0ezJuPZ/%22I'm-Feeling-Dirty%22
Try it out! Enter in your own inputs and see what happens, edit some of the fields to make it your own.
Share your favorites. Here's an example of a snapshot I shared. Post your favorite snapshots, your fantastic remixes, and any other fabulous apps you create in the comments!

Hope to see you all next week at re:Invent in Las Vegas--and don't forget the #1 re:Invent tip--avoid walking through the smoky casino floors!, and check out my re:Invent 2023 dev talk, Thursday Nov 30, 1:30 PM, on the expo floor, next to the AWS Developer Lounge and Modern Apps area!

AWS re:Invent re:Play pre:Spoilers

Shandrew — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 22:52:31 +0000

Via some re:Invent promo materials, the musicians playing at the re:Play party, except for the headliner, have been announced! I was waffling on attending re:Play, as the conference week is intensely exhausting, but the Linda Lindas are an amazing punk band and it's worth going just to hear them (but note that none of the band meet the age requirement of 21 to attend re:Play!)

Two stages will rock with seven acts throughout the night. Our Live Stage will be headlined by Grammy-winning band Portugal. The Man and will feature performances by The Linda Lindas, Colony House, and King Youngblood. Over on our Main Stage, the re:Play All-Stars will return to kick us off, followed by Grammy-nominated DJ A-Trak before our DJ headliner closes out the party. Can you guess who will take the stage as our main headliner this year?

Past re:Play headline acts that I recall vividly are Martin Garrix (2022, 2016), Thievery Corporation (2022, 2018), Zedd (2021, 2015), Jen Lasher (several years--not the headliner, but my favorite out of these DJs), Skrillex (2018, 2014), deadmau5 (2013). I'm not much of an EDM fan but still enjoy the events, so Thievery Corp was particularly fun to see perform.

Really looking forward to the Linda Lindas this year, and Portugal.The Man also is sounding good (you probably know their one big song). Oh yeah, and the rest of the conference should be a blast as well. I will be speaking this year at an AWS Dev Chat, Thursday Nov 30, 1:30 PM, on the expo floor, next to the AWS Developer Lounge and Modern Apps area!

See you all next month in Las Vegas--and don't forget the #1 re:Invent tip--avoid walking through the smoky casino floors!

Survive AWS re:Invent by avoiding the worst air in Vegas — now with maps!

Shandrew — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 09:11:08 +0000

Indoor air quality is underrated as a factor in health, but has received renewed attention recently due to the airborne spread of COVID-19. My first job out of school was in air pollution modeling, and I spent years studying environmental engineering. Apparently all of my time in tech made me forget that good stuff, so I headed straight into the smoke.

At my first AWS re:Invent conference in 2013, I delivered two breakout sessions, talked to so, so many people, spent lots of time walking through and in smoky casinos, and ended up sick for the entire month after. I coughed and coughed, and you don't want to see what came out of my nasal passages. Since then I've figured out how to avoid the nasty, smoky air that is the casino miasma, making the next 7 re:Invents that I've been to far more enjoyable.

Here's how you can avoid the worst of the Vegas air, in the Venetian/Palazzo casinos. The key to avoiding the casino area is to stay on the second floor--the mall and canals area--but figuring out how to stay there can be tricky.

I've annotated these maps to help you out!

From the Venetian towers to the Sands conference center
From the Palazzo towers to the Sands conference center
From outside there are a few options--if you're near the north end you can walk directly to the basement floor entrance of the Sands (rideshare area) and avoid all of this. Then take escalators up to the Expo area. From the various front entrances of the Venetian, enter and find your way to the second floor ASAP.

If you get lost, well, you're not alone! The Venetian/Palazzo/Sands is the largest hotel complex in the country, and casino resorts are notorious for being designed to be confusing mazes.

Most other resorts/casinos also have similar paths for avoiding smoky gambling areas. Seek these out, save your lungs. Even if you live with smokers, you'll still be better off avoiding these areas as much as possible.

If you'll be at re:Invent this year, drop me a line and let's chat!

[shandrew has moved his social media presence to https://hachyderm.io/@shandrew ]