Trade Show, Day 1

[canyonwalker]

Vegas Travelog #2
Hilton Resorts World, Las Vegas - Mon, 27 Nov 2023. 8:45pm.

Day 1 of the trade show is done. Well, it's almost done. I'm back at my hotel, dressed down, grabbing a casual dinner. Yes, it's almost 9pm and I'm just now eating dinner. That's how things often roll at trade shows.

I'm in town for the mammoth AWS re:Invent show. It's drawing some 65,000 attendees this year, I've heard. Everything was a madhouse with crowds this afternoon. Getting a car from the airport was slow. Traffic was slow. The trade show floor was packed shoulder to shoulder.

Shows like this are always tiring. And no, it's not because Las Vegas is the epicenter of 24/7 entertainment. I find very little of Vegas entertaining anymore. It's tiring because it's many hours per day on my feet answering the same question over and over— "So, what does CompanyName do?"— for people who don't really care about my company's products but only want a free t-shirt or other giveaway. In other words, a typical big trade show.

That said, while 90%+ of the visitors to our booth will be freebie seekers, it's the other 10% we live for. Those are the folks who work in software and struggle with challenges of the kind we can fix. They'll see value in what we offer, and we're there to help them understand it.

Comments

[sorcyress]

On Friday I was hanging with friends and the topic of Jenkins came up --I pulled up your cosplay photos and the two CS nerds in the group were instantly thrilled and impressed. So definitely keep working for those 10%!

~Sor

[canyonwalker]

I'm curious where you got the links to older pictures as I realized just today, when I posted fresh pictures from the Amazon AWS re:Invent show, that I haven't actually posted any pictures here on Dreamwidth until now. I do have pics from older events in my blog over at LiveJournal... had I shared a link to that before?

[sorcyress]

This is the photo I showed! You linked it in this post (and I found that by doing a quick navigate to your url/2023/11 and then /10 and scanning subject lines until I found a relevant one). I suddenly feel like a stalker, but I promise it's just that I'm really good at finding information[1] and you're really good at organizing your information and making it easy to parse.

~Sor

1: "the blood of reference librarians runs in my veins" is my usual way of phrasing it. Which is true! My grandmother worked at the White House as a librarian!

[canyonwalker]

When I posted my reply above I'd forgotten that I put that link-- to a 2019 post on LiveJournal!-- in a blog I wrote in October 2023. But yeah, if you clicked my tags for "jenkins" or "cosplay" you'd have found that entry quickly. Then if you'd clicked through to LJ and clicked on the same tags there you'd have seen a lot more (even older) posts with pictures about cosplaying Jenkins the Butler. I do put effort into managing and applying tags, so I'm glad someone has found them useful for chasing down related content.