Being the Butler - AWS 2023 Edition

Vegas Travelog #4
AWS re:Invent conference - Tue, 27 Nov 2023. 3pm.

This week I've been attending the AWS re:Invent conference to staff my company's booth in the exhibitor showcase. I've done this countless times before for various conferences, including AWS re:Invent at least 3 times in past years, but this time I'm doing it a bit differently. I'm appearing as Jenkins the Butler— a personification of the logo for the popular Jenkins open source project. Well, I've done that a few times before at various conferences, too. But this time I'm portraying Jenkins the whole time.



The go-ahead to go wall-to-wall on being the butler comes amid a shift in attitude of my company's execs toward the Jenkins project. For years we've earned most of our money from selling a commercialized tool based on Jenkins. In return we do a lot of commits to support and improve the open source project. After getting off to a strong start co-marketing with Jenkins we entered a period with leadership that didn't want to associate us too closely with open source. That was kind of nuts because it has long been such a core part of our business. New leadership has embraced Jenkins again, redoubling our investment in building enhancements on it and being proud to tell people that's what we do.



Part of that pride in what we do is including messaging about Jenkins and the Jenkins logo in our branding. At this conference we've gone even further making Jenkins one of our give-aways. Oh, we've always had Jenkins stickers, and we have them again this year. But this year we also have Jenkins masks! There's even a contest— tweet pictures of 3 or more Jenkins in the frame to enter to win an Xbox!

"Being the Butler", as I call it, has been fun, as always. The reactions I get from people are great. Some spot me from 10 to 15 feet away, do a whole-body double take, and beam with smiles as they recognize me. Others don't notice me right away— I figure that's because the conference is pretty crowded, and the show floor is basically nonstop sensory overload with so many things sights and sounds— until they're already talking to one of my colleagues. Then they finally notice me looking at them from 3 feet away with an obsequious smile and basically do a spit-take. Nobody expects Jenkins the Butler to appear live, in 3D!




On Tuesday it was bright out when I walked to the conference center, so I wore my sunglasses when I was on the street. Once at the show I took them off because they're not part of the standard Jenkins character. But I donned them a few times for a variation I call Dark Jenkins. He puts the Security in DevSecOps! He'll fail your build if your code doesn't pass all the tests!

Ten Floors Short of the 54th

Vegas Travelog #5
Hilton Resorts World, Las Vegas - Wed, 29 Nov 2023. 3pm.

I wrote yesterday about my room on the 54th floor at the Resorts World casino. There's something that's been bothering my engineer/architect-fu all week, though. It's not actually the 54th floor. Sure, the room numbers all start with "54" and the button in the elevator says "54", but in truth it's 10 floors short of that. How? There are no floors 40-49.

There are no buttons for 40-49 in the elevator. None of the three banks of elevators goes to 40-49. And when the elevator's floor indicator goes from 39 to 50 on the way up, and 50 to 39 on the way down, it's an immediate transition. There's no pause like it's bypassing 10 secret levels. Those levels just don't exist.

Why no floors 40-49? My best hypothesis is that it's because 4 is considered a very unlucky number in Chinese. The Chinese word for "4" is a near homophone for "death" (they have the same sound but different tonality). The gambling company behind Resorts World is based in Malaysia and Singapore. When I've traveled in Greater China I've observed that buildings frequently don't have floors 4, 14, 28, etc. I don't think I saw an elevator with all of 40-49 missing... though the few times I visited a building at least that tall I didn't look too carefully at the elevator keypads.

Trade Show Day 3: Three Things

Vegas Travelog #6
Resting up before dinner - Wed, 29 Nov 2023. 7pm.

Trade shows are actually about three things. One of them is the people who come to the booth. While in literally terms this is the purpose of trade shows it is actually the least important element. That's because 90% of the people who come to the booth don't care about the company or its products and are just trolling for tchotchkes.

Beyond servicing the swag hounds there's also the buzz effect. That's accomplished through having a message— which can be total bullshit— that plays well with the media and on social media. I dislike it. (I know how to play the bullshit game, I'm just not a natural at it like people who are bullshit born-and-bred.) I put in a solid 4 hours at the booth today supporting this aspect of the trade show.

The second element of trade shows is talking to actual customers and prospects. I carved out a few hours today to talk to one and give a demo of our flagship product. On the one hand it felt like I was shirking booth duty; but on the other hand I was talking to a group of people who are legit considering buying something— as opposed to gaming us for how to get a free t-shirt.

The third element of trade shows is the extra curricular activities. These are critical for networking. In my case it was internal networking. Yes, I need to engage in constant effort to make myself known to my own colleagues. I've been working at the same company for over 6 years.... In that time I've had 5 direct managers, 4 (soon to be 5) department heads, and 4 CxOs, and 4 CEOs. Every few months I'm building a new relationship all over again with some manager hired in from the outside. 🙄

To that end I'm going out this for a team dinner being hosted by one of our sales VPs. It's a late dinner, 8:30pm, and I feel so sorely tempted just to pass on it, eat a quiet (and earlier) dinner by myself, and get to bed at a reasonable hour. But this dinner will be crucial relationship-building time with one of our execs.