Of Community Days & New Beginnings
To be really honest, there was no good way to start with this post. I tried a million ways to do so by staying true to facts, but it either sounded like
a. I had discovered the next best thing after bread OR
b. I had written the transcript to a sermon that I’d deliver for the bread-worshiping cult I just founded. (P.S. I might or not might have an inane fascination with bread)
Then came the dilemma of transitioning to the actual content. How people write nice segues to their articles without spiraling into the deep well of indecision is beyond me! But, I digress. This post is neither about my writer’s block (or my reader’s!) or bread. I recently had an amazing opportunity to work behind the scenes of the first ever AWS Community Day organized in Pune and this post is my attempt at encapsulating the experience!
We were off to a rocking start on 7th Feb, 2020 at the MCCIA towers with three hands-on, full day workshops catering to different interests — Machine Learning, Kubernetes, and Serverless. It was very encouraging to see that all three of them were packed to the rafters despite it being a working day for most of the attendees!
Such community days, I believe, are the fulcrum around which the engagement of the members is supported. While weekly meetups are a good way to keep them engaged, an event organized for and by the community gives everyone a chance to contribute and be a part of something bigger than themselves and their job roles. A proof of this was the many inquiries we received on volunteering for future events conducted by the group. Despite it being an early wake-up call than MOST of my days, it also gets to be listed in the very few when I didn’t need to get my daily shot of caffeine owing to the extremely infectious energy of my co-volunteers, organizers, attendees, and speakers.
On 8th Feb, 2020 was when all our combined organizational skills were put to test on Day 2 conducted at Hyatt Regency, Pune. It was an even earlier morning than the day before and let’s just end the discussion about my caffeine intake with the statement that more than a few coffees were had to stay awake! Catering to over 600+ people including sponsors, speakers, and attendees was no mean task and it helped that all of us on the organizing committee knew each other (at least from the day before, if not longer!) to ensure seamless co-ordination.
We had a stellar speaker lineup from across the globe, details of which can be found at: https://awscommunitydaypune.tech/index.html and I may be a *bit* biased in saying this, but ALL of the sessions conducted were super insightful and peppered with real-life use cases.
Doubling up as an emcee is not an experience I’m going to forget anytime soon because of the extremely cool people I got to invite upon stage and also had the good fortune of speaking to, offline.
While I cannot say that I have overcome stage fright or learned how to talk to people (lord knows, you need someone to shut me up once I start talking!), one of my key takeaways from this event was the community of people I met and the conversations we’ve had. The perspective shifts they offered were certainly eye-opening and I am absolutely thankful that I got this opportunity to work and speak with some of the brightest minds in the biz.
This post would obviously not be complete without a major round of thanks to all my co-volunteers & organizers — Rashmi Nambiar, Jayesh Ahire, Anurag Kale, Toshal Khawale, Abhishek Wagh, Pushkar Thakur, Rahul Kaul, Vishal Alhat, Payal and Bhumika for being such stellar folks to work with! I definitely look forward to meeting all of you at future AWS meetups and the AWS Summit in April :)
