My Journey to the AWS APAC Community Summit 2022

5 min readSep 20, 2022

Hi everyone! A few days ago (September 14th), I was heading to Bangkok to attend the first AWS APAC Community Summit 2022. So here I’m gonna share all things like stories and moments during that time.

By the way, you may already saw a lot of posts about this event with the #AWSCommunityAPAC #APACCommunitySummit #AWSCommunity

Invitation

Starting from an invitation email from the AWS APJ Community manager to attend this event two months ago. That was midnight when I received the email with the title “Are you able to attend the APJ Community Summit?”. I wasn’t immediately excited when I got it because I used to think that it would be like re:Invent which AWS Community Builders will get a 50% discount but it was not. I read the email one more time and I was getting surprised that it was totally free and I just needed to come. So I told my mom about this and asked “Do I let myself go to Bangkok?”, but she didn’t believe me at first. She thought that I was just dreaming and kidding. I tried very hard to tell my mom about this until she believed me and then she became the most excited person. Then in the morning, I went to the immigration office with my mom for applying my passport since it was gonna be my first time going abroad.

Pre-event

I was supposed to go to Bangkok on September 14th, but I left home on September 13th because I had to go to another city that is closer to the international airport. There was also a little problem when I came to the hotel I had booked because they said the room was full, but I was lucky I got another nearby hotel in a short time. Then on September 14th, I was going to the airport for my flight to Bangkok. As I said before, I wasn’t alone. I was with three people that had the same flight schedule so I wasn’t too scared to get on a plane. It was for approximately 6 hours because we had a layover in Singapore.

The landing time in Bangkok has arrived and we went through all the immigration processes till the baggage claim. We also met other colleagues who came from another city and were waiting for us to go to the hotel together, so we were seven in total. But there was one incident where one of us didn’t find the luggage. Then, we were all together waiting for it. That was where the most fun journey began.

After that, we were going to the hotel. Since we were seven in total, we decided to go to the hotel by train together. The destination was “Ratchaprarop” station which is close to Anantara Siam Bangkok Hotel. During the journey, we talked about funny things and laughed so much. For example: Because we couldn’t pronounce the name of the Thai station correctly, someone mentioned it “Manggarai” which is the station name in Indonesia, and many more fun things that make me sometimes try so hard to remember them all. Then, we arrived at the hotel but some of us (including me) entered the wrong hotel at first which was the next of the hotel it should be. Actually, there was also a welcome dinner on the same day, but we were unable to attend it because it was over when we arrived.

Swag

Welcome kit with Bangkok vibes (Tuk-Tuk and Elephant).

Day 1

The AWS APAC Community Summit was started and we were all at the Grand Ballroom. We met each other for the first time even from the same country (for me). Yup! I met all of them for the first time at this event and I’m so happy for getting closer with them in a short time. I also had a little conversation during lunch with some of them who came from different countries and they are so kind.

On the first day, we got mostly technical presentations from AWS as well as fellow CBs. We also had breakout sessions and I joined the Serverless topic. Here I won’t share the documentation that shows the slides because it may have a copyright or something like that.

Later in the evening, we had a party as well as awards. We enjoyed it so much and congratulations to all nominees and winners of each category!

Day 2

I can say it was my favorite since we didn’t only get technical presentations but also non-technical. They talked about community, diversity, and many more. I love it so much when it comes to the “Art of Story Telling”. Why? Because I love writing and I really love to discuss about it. I often create stories or scenarios to let everyone enjoy my technical content in a fun way instead of taking it too seriously. So the session was very insightful for me.