AWS CDK
Live Demo

At the AWS Summit in New York in July 2019, Dr. Werner Vogels’s keynote included the AWS Cloud Development Kit, which lets developers define their cloud infrastructure in familiar programming languages. I wrote the demo that showed it in action, and presented it live on stage.

I didn’t write the keynote, only my few minutes of it. It was also the first time I worked with Dr. Vogels, a couple of years before I would go on to lead his keynotes.

It very nearly didn’t make it. In rehearsal my demo ran to nine minutes in a five-minute slot, and the keynote lead was, quite rightly, having words with the demo team about it. Dr. Vogels overheard. He said the keynote needed more code, that he liked the demo, and that he would shorten his own part instead.

I will be forever grateful that they kept it. Now that I lead keynotes myself, I know that if a section ran four minutes over, I might well have cut it.