Last Tuesday I went to my first AWS Summit. A good handful of us made the trip from my team and the immediate area, and we spread out across the day to cover different tracks and workshops. Between us we got a wide range of experience out of it, and comparing notes at the end of the day was genuinely interesting. I usually gravitate towards smaller conferences, but this one absolutely delivered.
The Gameday
The standout for me was a gameday I'd signed up for. I didn't know anyone else in my assigned team going in, which lasted all of about five minutes before we were deep into the first task together. That's the thing about a well-designed gameday: the problem in front of you does the introductions.
The gameday was sponsored by Clumio, who make software for securing AWS resources. Their tooling came up in one of the tasks and it was easy to get to grips with quickly, which you appreciate when you're racing a clock. The tasks themselves were brilliant: one involved prompt engineering to build fighting robots, which is exactly as entertaining as it sounds. There was also a challenge using AWS Bedrock to work with knowledge bases, which felt very relevant to what a lot of people in the room were probably thinking about building.
We came first. I hadn't gone in expecting that, and I suspect the rest of the team hadn't either. We left with AWS baseball caps and unicorn plushies, which is a very good return on a day out.
A team of strangers, a shared problem, a time limit. It's a great format. Everyone contributed, the energy was high throughout, and by the end of it you actually know the people you were sat with.
The Rest of the Day
Outside the gameday I went to a workshop on building an AI chatbot and a talk from a colleague at the Met Office about training AI to produce the shipping forecast. That second one had a particular kind of satisfaction to it: seeing work that's happening close to you presented on a big stage gives it a weight that's hard to explain to someone who wasn't there. You know the effort and context behind it in a way the rest of the audience doesn't.
AI was the thread running through the whole event. AWS Bedrock appeared constantly, whether as the backbone of a demo, a workshop tool, or a reference point in talks. If you're working anywhere near cloud and haven't started thinking about where Bedrock fits into what you're building, a day at the summit makes that case convincingly just through sheer volume.
After the Summit
The day didn't end at the venue. There was a civil service meetup afterwards at Electric Shuffle in Canary Wharf, which was a great way to decompress and carry on the conversations from the day in a much more relaxed setting. Highly recommended as a format if you're organising something similar.
What I'm Taking Away
The gameday format is something I want to look into bringing to work. The combination of a real technical challenge, a time constraint, and a team working out how to operate together produces an energy that's hard to manufacture any other way. It's worth advocating for.
The AI angle has also pushed me further along a path I was already on. Seeing agentic AI used practically across multiple sessions gave me the nudge to stop reading about it and actually get stuck in. I've since installed Claude Code on my home server (write-up here) and I'm investigating OpenClaw, which handles tasks like inbox management, emails, and calendar through WhatsApp or Telegram. The summit didn't tell me anything I couldn't have found in a blog post, but sometimes you need the room to make it feel real.