That’s a wrap on the AWS Pop-up Loft London!

It’s been epic. More than 1,000 visitors, 12,000 Twitch views and counting, 36 breakout sessions, 19 live streams, 5 hands-on workshops, 3 networking evenings, 2 breakfast briefings, a Fintech innovation showcase, and an AWS Community Day later, we’ve now officially closed the London Pop-up Loft for yet another year.

Thanks to an interesting mix of speakers and events—including our first-ever live Twitch stream from a Loft location—we were thrilled to see record participation at this year’s Loft. The Twitch stream, in particular, was popular in our community as it allowed our technical experts to engage with our viewers by answering questions live in the stream chat during our marathon 6-hour broadcast sessions. If you missed it, you can still catch up on-demand via the AWS Twitch channel, or view the sessions on the AWS YouTube channel.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning:

• An Introduction to Deep Learning – Presented by Julien Simon, AWS Principal Evangelist (check out his medium blog, Julien is a top writer in the Artificial Intelligence section!)
• Amazon Polly and Amazon Rekognition – Presented by Ian Massingham, AWS Worldwide Lead Technical Evangelism
• Building Chatbots with Amazon Lex – Presented by Ian Massingham, AWS Worldwide Lead Technical Evangelism
• Building Serverless AI-powered Applications on AWS – Presented by Adrian Hornsby, AWS Technical Evangelist
• Fraud Detection and Machine Learning on AWS – Presented by Dr. Andrew Kane, AWS Solutions Architect
• Maximising the customer experience with Amazon Connect and Artificial Intelligence Services – Presented by Paul Armstrong, AWS Solutions Architect

Serverless:

• Getting Started by AWS Lambda and AWS Serverless – Presented by Abby Fuller, AWS Senior Technical Evangelist
• Serverless Architectural Patterns – Presented by Abby Fuller, AWS Senior Technical Evangelist
• Serverless Development Deep Dive – Presented by Paul Maddox, AWS Specialist Solutions Architect
• What’s happening at the Edge? – Presented by Danilo Poccia, AWS Technical Evangelist
• AWS Lambda@Edge Lightning Demos – Presented by Lee Atkinson, AWS Solutions Architect

DevOps and Developer Tools:

• Introduction to AWS Developer Tools – Presented by Ian Massingham, AWS Worldwide Lead Technical Evangelism
• Introduction to AWS IoT – Presented by Boaz Ziniman, AWS Technical Evangelist
• Containers on AWS – Presented by Paul Maddox, AWS Specialist Solutions Architect & Ric Harvey, Ticketmaster
• Development Workflows on AWS – Presented by Steve Engledow, AWS Professional Services

Big Data & Analytics:

• AWS Batch: Simplifying Batch Computing in the Cloud – Presented by Adrian Hornsby, AWS Technical Evangelist
• Introduction to AWS Glue – Presented by Ian Robinson, AWS Specialist Solutions Architect
• Serverless Big Data Analytics – Presented by Ian Robinson, AWS Specialist Solutions Architect
• Deploying your Data Warehouse on AWS – Presented by Pratim Das, AWS Specialist Solutions Architect

For the corresponding sessions’ slides, follow this link.

Some of the other highlights from the Loft include our AWS Data Privacy and GDPR breakfast,

Attendees at the AWS Data Privacy and GDPR breakfast.

where AWS legal and data security experts spoke about how customers can address obligations under EU data protection laws and regulations. Check out the following resources for a refresher of what the session covered:

• EU Data Protection
• AWS Assurance Programs
• CISPE

The FinTech Innovation Talk offered Loft visitors a chance to hear from Starling Bank, Tail and TransferWise on how they’ve been approaching the challenge of digital innovation on behalf of their customers. Taking advantage of cloud services has enabled Starling Bank to build their own API marketplace to attract other FinTech companies like Tail and TransferWise to offer seamless complementary services aimed at enhancing digital banking. We have now published the slides from all customer talks, you can find them here.

Week two was when the workshop schedule really kicked off with the Wild Rydes Serverless Web Application workshop that had AWS technical evangelists Adrian Hornsby, Boaz Ziniman and Danilo Poccia introduce the basics of building serverless web applications using AWS services like AWS Lambda, Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Cloudfront. Check out the workshop slides here. On the second day of workshops, Neeraj Kumar, AWS Solutions Architect, showed how customers can build intelligent IoT solutions with Amazon Machine Learning and to wrap up the week, AWS Microsoft expert Julien Lepine, delivered an advanced workshop on developing Microsoft applications on AWS. (Catch up on some of the content covered with this on-demand webinar.) We shouldn’t miss mentioning our first week workshops too – during the Deep Learning workshop we showed participants how to build, train and use models based on different types of networks: multi-layer perceptrons, convolutional neural networks and long short-term memory networks. Last but not least, the AWS GameDay saw 10 teams from the fictional startup Unicorn.Rentals competing against each other for a prestigious trophy – the team with the best DevOps skills got to put their name on a little traveling unicorn statue.

Deep Learning Workshop with Julien Simon, AWS Principal Evangelist – AWS customers running AI in production on AWS.

AWS GameDay featuring Joe, AWS Solutions Architect, guarding the prizes for the winners.

A huge thank you to everyone who took time out of their busy diaries to come to the London Loft, to those of you who took part online, who got involved on our social channels and who continue to help us build an awesome AWS community with your feedback and participation. If you have a moment, we’d appreciate you filling out our Loft survey, so we can improve the experience you get next time. When you’re done, we’ll redirect you to all the publicly available slides from the Loft sessions!

Next stop? We’re going on a Bavarian odyssey, with the Munich Pop-up Loft hitting town from 09 November to 15 December. Check back here at the AWS Startups Blog for a full breakdown coming soon, and continue following updates on our AWS Startups Twitter handle.

P.S.: Fun fact – Did you know that between us, we managed to consume over 7,000 cups of tea and coffee, drank over 350 beers, 40 bottles of wine and devoured enough biscuits (last count=85 packets) to put the Cookie Monster to shame? Good times…