My experience at the AWS UG Peru Conference 2023
Last Saturday, I had the opportunity to share my knowledge as a speaker at the AWS UG Peru Conference 2023. It was a wonderful experience; I will share it in this post.
An Event Huger Than Expected
When I postulated to be a speaker at this conference, I totally underestimated the event’s magnitude. 4500 registered persons, 2300 attendees, and more than 100 speakers in just one day making it one of the biggest AWS events in Latin America. It was impressive!
4 floors of the PUCP Cultural Center in Lima were full of AWS enthusiasts attending highly diverse talks and participating in activities, workshops, and contests; an El Dorado for any cloud lover!
Speakers from all over the Americas shared their knowledge in various languages. I chose to speak Spanish to feel more comfortable and answer the audience’s questions easily.
A Risky Talk
For my talk, I chose to make a live demo of a real-time multiplayer game created with Unity3D and Amazon GameLift. Undoubtedly a bold bet since this live demo required multiple fully operational Unity clients, some Amazon services running on the cloud, and an excellent internet connection. If one of those components did not respond as expected, it would have been a total failure!
Following my fellow AWS CB Diana Alfaro’s wise advice, I recorded the whole demo the day before the conference. In the worst case, I would have shown a video to the audience. Maybe not the ideal scenario, but it would have saved the day.
Hopefully, the internet of the PUCP Cultural Center could handle thousands of simultaneous connections with a high bandwidth; perfect! I could make my demo without experiment any inconvenience.
A Great Audience
I will be honest; for this talk, I was expecting a cloud veterans audience, but the title of my talk attracted the curiosity of young people interested in video game creation, and the result was awesome! I’m aware that the content I’m producing through my posts and videos may be uncommon, and I was so thrilled that so many people came to see my talk!
The spectators paid a lot of attention and asked me questions about GameLift, Unity, and game development in general. A lucky guy in the first row could even participate in the demo: I let him play with one of the Unity clients running on a mobile device while everybody could see it on the projector screen.
Final Thoughts
It was an incredible experience, and I hope to be part of the AWS UG Peru Conference next year as a speaker and as a member of the organization’s staff.
My talk was not recorded, but I created a video summarizing the Q&A section.
My First Experience as a Speaker in an AWS Conference was originally published in Better Programming on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.