For our second meetup of the year, we had a full house. Considering we had a pair of excellent speakers that’s probably not a surprise, but still very good to see.
Before getting to the talks, let’s have a look at how some of the changes worked out. With the help of some of our friends from the #volunteers channel setting up the room became a lot easier, so thank you for helping us. In addition we experimented with name badges, where we provided you all with the opportunity to write your name on a sticker and put it on your shirt. Many of you took up this opportunity, and from what we’ve heard so far it sounds like it worked in making everyone a bit more approachable.
As usual before the presentations we did our news segment as well. Unfortunately, there weren’t a lot of announcements as it looks like we’ve hit a bit of a dry spell after the flood surrounding re:Invent. In fact, our “Finally in Sydney” segment only had a single item: Aileen Gemma Smith is Australia’s fourth (and Sydney’s first) Community Hero. Hopefully next month will have more, and remember that we discuss all the news in the #announcements Slack channel as well.
But while the news segment left us a little bit wanting, that was not the case with our speakers. We started out with Christopher Grainger’s talk concerning “Automating machine learning pipelines with AWS Lambda”. In this talk, Christopher told us how his company is able to leverage Lambda functions for their machine learning. While Lambda has some limitations and can’t be used for everything, it turns out to be a wonderful tool for many of the tasks they need to achieve. As a brief summary can’t really do it justice, I recommend that you watch the embedded video below to see how this all works. And of course, you can download the slides as well.
Our second speaker was Matthew Merriel, who in his talk “Static Site Generators and AWS - are they a match made in heaven?” explained how you can get a static website up and running on AWS in a very short time. With a live demo, he showed how easy it is to make your changes in your Gatsby source code and then push it up to GitHub where Amplify picks it up and does the rest for you. The slides are available, but as most of the presentation was a demo it’s probably best to watch the below video.
Finally, we want to acknowledge once again that none of this is possible without our sponsors. Innablr is our gold sponsor for 2019, with Bulletproof and Parallels as our silver sponsor. Many thanks to them for ensuring we have food and drinks available for all of you. Even if the pizza arrived half an hour early this time.