AWS News Blog
Werewolves of London
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I’m 2/3rds of the way through a trip that will take me to three cities in the UK and then on to Boston before returning home.
Late last week I gave the keynote at the d.Construct conference in Brighton, and received quite a bit of nice blog coverage:
- Suw Charman was happy that I was snappier and more engaging than I have been in some previous talks (thanks in part to her feedback), and that I showed some “Cool examples of the way that people are using Amazon’s APIs, including one that allows you to visually compare and contrast the specs for computers on sale in Amazon – really neat idea and if I can find the url I’ll link to it.” That demo was from the Hive Group and you can find it here.
- Black Phoebe said “I wish Mr. Barr was a bit more excited and not so biz buzz dense presentation. Maybe programmer/developers like this style.” Hmmm, I’d rather that the developers walk away with a good memory of what I talked abot rather than about the presenter, so this is ok. I do think that the subject material itself is pretty exciting.
- The Mildly Diverting blog says “To be honest, it felt like a very shiny hour long sales pitch; there was little information there that I hadn’t picked up from generally reading stuff on the internet (appart from some of the technical gubbins, which made a lovely X-wingy noise as it flew over my head).” There wwere plenty of gubbins, wrapped around a shiny pitch.
- The Friends of Ed blog also thought that I gave a sales pitch: “This basically involved Jeff, Amazon web services evangelist, giving the attendees a sales pitch on Amazon web servicesbut they are pretty damn coolvery impressive stuff!”
- The Nodalities blog notes that I am now using James Governor’s memorable phrase “Hardware As A Service” to describe Amazon EC2, and continues the neolinguistics by labeling the Amazon Mechanical Turk as “People As A Service.” Ok, cool, I like that!
- Tom Hume says “the Amazon S3 and EC2 services look incredible (though they’re not for everyone, I suspect). There are a couple of things we are looking to do at the moment for which EC2 might be perfect (and wind up saving us tens to hundreds of thousands of pounds).”
I took the train from Brighton to London on Saturday morning, checked in to my hotel, and then gave a presentation to the London Perl Mongers. Appropriately enough, given the name of the group, this meeting took place on a quiet side street by the name of Ironmonger Row. I didn’t see anyone selling any iron (or any Perl for that matter). Here’s a short review.
Early Monday morning I took the train down to Winchester (a lovely and historic place that I saw far too little of) and visited with my friends at IBM who run the Eight Bar Blog.
In the afternoon I headed back to London and met with some members of Amazon’s UK PR team and their PR agency. We talked about some of the cool applications that are being built using ECS, with a special focus on Second Life.
Ok, this morning I head over the Atlantic to Boston, and will present to the Boston Perl Mongers tonight at 7 PM on the MIT Campus. The meeting will take place in room E51-376.
Thursday I will be discussing Web Services Best Practices at the SD Best Conference, and I’ll be heading home after that.
— Jeff;
PS – If you are mystified by the title of this post and/or about the picture (which I took over the weekend), you must not know the lyrics to the Warren Zevon classic, Werewolves of London:
Saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain
He was looking for a place called Lee Ho Fook’s
Going to get himself a big dish of beef chow mein
Yikes I’m getting old!