SpotShot´s adventure at the AWS Summit in Berlin 2018 #SpotShotEvents

Welcome to our new series: #SpotShotEvents

The #SpotShotFamily is going to be present at many events from now on. SO STAYED TUNED, we are going to blog about the cool stuff we learn and the awesome people we meet! Read on then and let Jakob , our Lead Designer, tell you all about his experience at the summit...

As the Lead Designer at SpotShot, my main goal is to enable our app users an experience that is attractive to the eye and is fun at the same time. I work primarily on the esthetics and the beauty of every Screen that is shown at the surface of the SpotShot app. Summarized, I design what the users see. You might think then, an AWS (Amazon Web Services) Summit would not be the right event for someone like me. I mean, what does a Designer understand when a Speaker is talking about topics like RDS, EC2, Mongo DB ? Maybe as much as a developer understands about CMYK, Typography and Layers?

Well in my case, an event like the AWS Summit actually makes a lot of sense! So let me tell you a bit about my background and also my experience with AWS in the past.
When I started, as a Freelance Webdesigner after leaving my company q23.media I was desperately searching for my first customer. And I found that customer in dr-rosefid.de for whom I developed a branding update and designed the new website, including a Magento shop system. But I also jumped directly into a “suicidal” idea: i would host the system by myself! And of course, on AWS as I heard so much about it. So I created an AWS account, started a EC2 and set up my first server with apache, sql and all that stuff after long nights watching tutorials. Cutting the story short: it was a mess… but I did not give up! I went on for one year and learned many new things and committed hundreds of mistakes. For example, I moved the database from sql on the EC2 to a separated RDS that made screenshots every 30 minutes, that before I had just lost all data from the past 2 days for the company… ugh my bad! That is why I digged deeper and deeper into the possibilities of AWS. And in the end…it burned me down. Honestly, I am not a DevOp as I wished I was, but at least I tried, and learned enough to understand what’s being told here on this great event. I love innovation and i admire AWS for their constant new updates. A keynote at AWS is quite almost as sexy as a keynote from Apple, and don’t forget, I am a designer… blush

So let me go back to the first day of the Summit and tell you how I experienced it...

DAY 1:
I am sitting in the top Terrasse melting in the sun during my break. Its quite hot outside today, but inside the STATION Berlin, where the AWS Summit has settled, there is a nice air conditioned temperature. Marcel, our Lead Developer, and I have had an interesting first part of the day so far, starting with the AWS keynote introduced by their CEO and followed by their CTO. The stage „Kuno“ is the biggest and it has been beautifully set up with these glowing water containers that somehow every other event or club in Berlin is using at the moment. The big topic seems to be AWS Cloud 9 and Machine Learning. Over the whole keynote I smash keywords in our SpotShot Slack channel, points like: - AWS Sagemaker: which is all about Machine Learning, - Deep Lens: a camera that analyzes and recognizes its environment and takes action, S3 Select: a tool that stores the data on AWS and the Achieve Drastic Performance increases up to around 400% (which would be very useful when it comes to storing our app data) and so on. After the 2 hour long keynote, I went straight to get a coffee and proceed to check out the Startup Area where Marcel was listening to a session about Microservices. The startup area hosted around 12 startups. Each had a small booth presenting their apps and platforms. Many “techy” like startups, but also some Startups that specialized in marketing and ERP solutions like Orderbird or Liveintent. I talked to some and we discussed how SpotShot could be integrated into their projects. It was great because I received a lot of feedback and many impressions of what could be possible.
Day 1 at the AWS Summit ended then with a networking session. A lot of beer and salty finger food, plus interesting people like Deep Goshn from AWS Business Applications that asked me a lot about our SpotShot challenge app.
And finally, back home I finished the day by uploading all image impressions and writing down some notes for this article.

DAY 2:
On day 2 Mersad (CEO at SpotShot) joined me instead of Marcel who had some code to crunch. As I knew the location already I gave Mersad a quick tour of the AWS Summit. Then we joined the „Day 2 Keynote“ over 2 hours, this time we sat in the front row. Various topics were discussed like: Better Security and Performance with AWS Config, Nitro was also a big issue this time. They talked a lot about it. But also the official announcement of VMWare Cloud partnering up with AWS was important and largely presented by the CEO of VMWare.
After that, I ran to get my first coffee of the day. By the way, the food was for free and it was tasty.. they had a lot of those food stands…plus they provided vegetarian food. Great stuff, good Job AWS!
Our next stop, was again the Startup Area. Only this time we took a tour. The guy from AWS introduced himself and the told us the complete AWS story. New for me, was that AWS emerged from Amazon because they had too much server capacity and they were only using that amount of capacity at Christmas time. So, they started to rent their server and implement service by service. And so, AWS was born. Well done! blush again After that story, the tour was quite boring to be honest, so left and went to the stage to listen to some VC’s that were speaking in the Startup Area. They told us about the DO’S and DON’TS for approaching VC’s and investors, in the middle they had a girl from a startup that had just got funding moments before. When it came to the Q&A ,I wanted Mersad to ask for their opinion on Crypto and Blockchain, but the guy before us in line to ask the question “stole” our question. And the answer was quite defensive and funny. In the end, the VC said that he just hoped for Blockchain and Crypto to go away… yeah, no wonder!
We actually spent quite the whole time in the Startup Area. After 7 hours, we had the feeling that we couldn’t get much more out from the event, so we said thanks and went our way.

Marcel & Me saying thank you

My conclusion: The topics discussed at AWS Summit are not yet that relevant for us, it is too early. We still need to develop and release our Beta App before a giant like AWS becomes interesting player for us. Nevertheless… We pitched a lot, met many people and we learned where the journey will go for AWS and where it could meet with the future of SpotShot. GAME ON!

Jakob
Lead Designer at SpotShot