I became one of a small cadre of people authorized to live-tweet from AWS-branded Twitter handles, including AWSonAir which is used for live coverage of major AWS events. My first assignment was VMworld, held that year in Las Vegas, where a big joint announcement was being made. If I recall correctly, this was the first time AWS had sent someone to do this kind of live coverage at a third-party event, though they had been covering AWS events for some time.

There was a test as part of the certification process to become a live tweeter for AWS. This included several examples of photos we should and shouldn’t tweet – literally “What’s wrong with this picture?” I LOLled, because one of the photos featured my then-manager, Adrian Cockcroft (no, he was not what was wrong with the photo).

The photo above was as close as I got to AWS CEO Andy Jassy at that event.

I tweeted key points from AWS presentations, and also live broadcast short videos of AWS speakers in the AWS booth. I was pleasantly surprised at the iPhone X’s ability to pick out the voice of the person I was filming against a lot of background noise. I had done a lot of this kind of thing at conferences for years, but I used to have to lug around a video camera and mics, and would then have to get the video off the camera, edit it, and upload it somewhere to make it available. Or else I had to have a whole streaming setup which pinned me to a chair in an auditorium. Being able to live broadcast from a small device held in my hand was new to me.

I met two more powerhouse women colleagues: exec Sandy Carter, and Aarthi Raju.

You may notice a lot of similar-looking photos in these event collections (where I haven’t yet whittled down my photo galleries). I would take a bunch of photos of any given scene/speaker in my effort to get a really good shot to share on Twitter.