Serverless Ninja | Black Rock City to Las Vegas

It’s this time of the year every AWS builder is waiting for: the AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. Announcements of new AWS services, improvements to existing ones, networking, social gatherings, knowledge exchange, workshops, etc. An absolute AWS pilgrimage for all the cloudy nerds around the world.

I will not have a chance to attend re:Invent this year, so will be watching the keynotes live and scroll through my feeds with a strong feeling of FOMO :) However, I have already spent a week in a Nevada desert this year, and it was truly life-changing experience.

Dust and Neons

I’ve managed to get some tickets for the Burning Man 2025: Tomorrow Today. This was not an easy task, as their ticket sale system is truly over-complicated. It was always on my bucket list (nothing to do with S3 buckets) to attend this unique event, just like the AWS re:Invent.

What is the Burning Man anyway? It’s a temporary city that rises from dust each August in the middle of Black Rock Desert in Nevada, built entirely by the people who attend it. For one week, roughly 70K-80K participants create art, chase moving music platforms, share experiences on the The Playa, and live by a set of community principles, before disassembling everything and leaving the desert empty again.

It is not a festival where you can just simply buy a ticket and consume entertainment. There are no headliners, no vendors selling food, no corporate sponsors with logos across stages. You bring everything you need to survive, and you contribute something back to the community around you.

What remains when the dust settles isn’t the city infrastructure, but a set of ideas about how people can come together, share generously, and build something meaningful without traditional transactional relationships.

burningman-2025-sunrise burningman-2025-monolink

The Principles

Burning Man community live & breathe by The 10 Principles. Written by co-founder Larry Harvey as general guidelines, and as a reflection of the community’s ethos & culture developed organically over years.

The Burning Man Project and the principles were nothing new for me. But when reviewing them as part of my preparation for my trip to Black Rock City, something has struck me. Most of them are in fact applicable to any community, including tech communities I’m familiar with like AWS Community.

I’ve tried to match these principles to many AWS Community guidelines (written or spoken), whenever they align or completely contradict in some interesting ways.

Radical Inclusion

Burning Man: Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation.
AWS Community: Welcome everyone regardless of skill level. User groups, meetups, and community days explicitly welcome beginners. No certifications required to attend, ask questions, or contribute. The no stupid questions culture. AWS Heroes and Community Builders actively reach out to newcomers.

Gifting

Burning Man: Devoted to acts of gift giving. The value of a gift is unconditional. Gifting does not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
AWS Community: Blog posts, webinars, tech talks, live demos, free workshops, office hours, open-source tools, answering forum questions. All of these are given away without expectation of mutual benefits. The currency is knowledge and it’s shared freely. Oh, and of course the laptop stickers. The stickers mean everything for all the geeks & nerds, helping us personalize our laptops, tablets, luggage.

Decommodification

Burning Man: Social environments unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising.
AWS Community: Tech events on the other hand do need the support: renting venues or spaces cost money, the swag doesn’t appear from nowhere. What is welcome: companies providing spaces, covering costs, offering products for hands-on exploration. Vendor booths are opt-in zones where commercial interaction is expected and appropriate. The core community experience (talks, networking, knowledge sharing) remains unmediated by sales pressure. There is a clear line about where commercialization belongs and doesn’t belong.

Radical Self-Reliance

Burning Man: Discover, exercise and rely on your inner resources.
AWS Community: The expectation that you’ll read the f… fabulous docs, try things yourself, come with specific questions rather than do the homework for me. That means building your own projects and learning how to troubleshoot your solutions.

Radical Self-Expression

Burning Man: Arises from unique gifts of the individual, offered as a gift to others.
AWS Community: Everyone’s technical journey is different. Sharing your unique perspective, your weird use cases, your unconventional approaches, your unicorn architectures, and your career path. The value of diverse voices in our content & talks, not just “official” AWS content.

Communal Effort

Burning Man: Creative cooperation and collaboration. Produce, promote and protect social networks and public spaces.
AWS Community: User Group meetups and Community Days are organized by volunteers. These include collaborative projects, maintaining Discord servers, Slack channels, forums. But also keeping the light on of the local community itself.

Civic Responsibility

Burning Man: Assume responsibility for public welfare… communicate civic responsibilities to participants.
AWS Community: Moderation, enforcing the Code of Conduct, mentoring newcomers on community norms, and speaking up when something’s wrong. Events organizers take responsibility for creating environment where all AWS community members feel welcome and safe.

Leave No Trace

Burning Man: We are committed to leaving no physical trace of our activities wherever we gather. We leave such places in a better state than when we found them.
AWS Community: Quite the opposite in fact: you should actually leave your trace. In tech communities, the “environment” is the accumulated knowledge, so leaving traces is the responsible act. Improving documentation, answering questions, closing unresolved issues. These traces are the gift to future community members, so please do contribute back, document, improve if you spot a gap.

Participation

Burning Man: We believe that transformative change, whether in the individual or in society, can occur only through the medium of deeply personal participation. Everyone is invited to work. Everyone is invited to play. We make the world real through actions that open the heart.
AWS Community: There is a big difference between lurking and contributing. “No spectators” simply translates to submitting that pull requests, writing that blog posts you have on your mind, ask that question publicly so others can learn, submit that call-for-papers proposal, volunteer to speak at community events (even if it sounds way too scary).

Immediacy

Burning Man: Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. Overcome barriers that stand between us and recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us.
AWS Community: Difference between attending a meetup while half-checking Slack and actually listening to the person explaining their architecture problem. Choosing a hallway conversation over adding another LinkedIn connection you’ll never message. It’s asking a question in person instead of waiting to Google it later. Immediacy pushes back against the temptation to treat community events as content-gathering exercises: collecting slides you’ll never read, snapping badge photos for social proof. None of that replaces the experience of being in the room, struggling with a concept in real time, and having someone next to you say I had that same problem. Be here, pay attention, the recording won’t capture what matters.

Summary

Two cities in the same state of Nevada. Black Rock City appears in the dust each August, burns bright, and vanishes, leaving nothing but pictures, videos, memories and a set of principles carried home by those who were there. Sin City glows in neons year-round, built on spectacle and gambling transactions, yet somehow becomes the gathering place for AWS tech community that runs on something different: shared knowledge, open contribution, and people showing up for each other.

The distance between Black Rock City and Las Vegas is about 500 miles or 800 kilometers. The distance between their philosophies might seem even greater. But every year, thousands of us make attendance to these magnetic events. And somehow such familiar principles travel with us.

You don’t need to attend Burning Man to practice these principles. You don’t even need to agree with all of them. But the next time you’re at a meetup, a community day, a summit, or any other similar tech event: make someone feel welcome, gift something cool like stickers (everyone loves them), and do leave your trace, share what you’ve learnt & experienced so far. The communities we’re building are temporary too. Let’s make them count while we’re part of them.

Resources

If you’re going to AWS re:Invent this year or planning to go in following years, I highly recommend a series of articles by my colleague Jimmy Dahlqvist (@jimmydqv). He is a well-known voice in the AWS community in the Nordics, an AWS Hero, and one of leaders of the AWS User Group Scania.

Until our paths cross again in the cloud shadows…

Black Rock City to Las Vegas