Woohoo a real life conference!
The 31st of March 2022 was going to be a magical day. It had been a while since we were able to attend a conference in the flesh, but when the opportunity to visit AWS Summit Brussels presented itself, three colleagues (Ehsan, Mahdi and Menno) from the DevOps team enthusiastically registered for the event and planned to carpool to Brussels.
Early morning (Mahdi woke up at 4:30 and first took a train to The Hague), but in good spirits, our colleagues went to Brussels. Traffic was terrible, but they pushed through over 60 minutes traffic jam, we’re lucky with finding a parking spot and arrived at The Egg where the event was going to be held.
Managing expectations…
Unfortunately, people unlearned some things in the last few years; like how to organize an event with real people with physical things that don’t scale like the cloud… The registration process was quite extensive, so planning the number of visitors who favourited talks for the program and ensuring this number of visitors stays withing capacity of the event venue shouldn’t be too difficult you would say.
After half an hour someone from AWS came outside. Apparently he was a security guy urging all people outside to the side; apparantly that many people outisde in front of the entrance was considered a fire hazard… as if the people outside there would purposely be going to block people from running outside in case of fire? No explanation on what was going on inside and why we couldn’t get in, no apologies, no expectation management.
https://twitter.com/dhubau/status/1509449514805047296
Apparently even speakers were left to stand in the cold…
Celebrating (other peoples) failure
One of the core values at Techspire is to “celebrate stuff”. So the colleagues decided to not waste their time much further and went on to turn this epic failure into a little celebration. What other summit could they visit? So they went to visit the famous Atomium and enjoyed a great panorama view over Brussels. After that it was time to feast on an amazing lunch. I guess it was pretty fun after all!
Just before lunch time Almost 3 hours too late the colleagues received an email… that AWS apologized and they were at full capacity, please watch the live stream. April fools came a day too early this year!
Be an awesome colleague
The news of this epic failure started spreading on our Slack channel pretty soon. We have a meme-thing going on at Techspire and what great opportunity to apply our own memes to mock brighten up the day of our patient but cold colleagues.
A selection of the fun:
High expectations
The rest of the company has high expectations of the next DevOps event our colleagues will attend are going to visit. If you have nice suggestions, please let us know!
