The story of how JAWS DAYS changed my life

Is there a conference that changed your life?

For me, there are two conferences that changed my life: PHP Conference 2015 and JAWS DAYS 2014.

The former is about conference management, and the latter is about my career. I will talk about the former on another occasion, and this time I will talk about the latter, JAWS DAYS 2014.

The original trigger (for this blog post)

The JAWS DAYS 2021 site is now open! Let's get started!

Mr. Miura shared it on Facebook, and as I was commenting that I was one of those whose life was changed by JAWS DAYS, well...

Before I knew it, things got exciting...

And it turned into writing a blog post. I've already finished writing the Advent Calendar I was in charge of, so I figured one extra post wouldn't hurt, which is why I'm writing this.

My encounter with JAWS DAYS 2014

At the time, I was engaged in the operation of a certain service running on AWS, but since I had just changed my career from a server-side engineer to an infrastructure engineer, I was in a period where I was worried about what to do in the future because I didn't know much about infrastructure and didn't really understand AWS. Looking back now, the operation itself involved a lot of manual work.

Back then, there weren't as many study groups as there are now, and since AWS was a new technology, there were no books at all. To top it off, my own antenna sensitivity was low, so I was really struggling to catch up.

In the midst of this, a university classmate, shinpy invited me, saying, "There's an event called JAWS DAYS, why don't you join?" so I decided to participate. At the time, the only acquaintance I had in the JAWS circle was him alone. If it weren't for him, I would never have crossed paths with JAWS, or there would have been a time lag of several years before I participated. I won't tell him directly, but I am truly grateful.

Ibisa-san from ASCII wrote an article about it at the time.

>I couldn't incorporate Immutable Infrastructure at all...
The person in the middle wearing white in the photo is me! How nostalgic! I was thin!

My technical values overturned by JAWS DAYS

Since I had never participated in a tech event or community before, I was overwhelmed by the atmosphere, the enthusiasm, and the difference in technical skills at the venue. I was surprised, thinking, "This is a world I don't know!" It was like coming to a theme park.

Not that I'm saying "Yeah!" though.

The lunch exchange ticket was an ELB.

It's the 5:00 PM Track 2 session, 'Immutable Infrastructure Panel Discussion: Let Me Have My Say Too'.

If you look at the site's timetable, you'll see that the then-hot Immutable Infrastructure track featured an incredibly star-studded lineup that would make anyone faint: Naoya Ito, Kazuki Narita, Michihiko Sawanobori, Ryutaro Yoshiba, Kosuke Miyashita, and Kentaro Kuribayashi. For someone like me who was building and operating systems manually at the time, the concept of Immutable Infrastructure—managing infrastructure as code—was a shock that overturned everything. I still remember listening intently, with Shinji Tanaka serving as the moderator for the panel discussion.

Anchipo-san's comment that 'Shikinen Sengu is the precursor to Immutable Infrastructure' was truly shocking, and it was the moment the fixed idea in my mind—that servers are always on and always running—was shattered.

Nowadays, it's normal for web servers to scale out and scale in, and it's standard to build them using some kind of provisioning tool or containers, but I didn't have any of that back then. It was a real eye-opener.

By the way, I did buy 'Introduction to Chef Solo' and tried it out, but I gave up.

Myself after participating in JAWS DAYS 2014

At JAWS DAYS 2014, my seniors taught me that 'if you want to learn AWS, you should join the community,' and since then, I have gotten to know and interacted with many people. There is no doubt that JAWS DAYS 2014 had a major impact on my engineering career.

And being told by the seniors in the JAWS community that 'there are plenty of people in the community who are knowledgeable about AWS, so if you don't know something, just ask' was a godsend for me, and I think it was a message from those seniors to be kind to the inexperienced people who would join in the future.

Some people might think, 'No way, a community can't change your life, lol,' but it really does. Of course, I think that's only if you have a strong desire to change.

Bonus

My parents' house was my parents' house back then, too. I'm properly wearing the loungewear provided by the facility.