Corey Quinn

Corey Quinn is the founder and chief cloud economist at Duckbill, where he helps companies understand, optimize, and reduce their AWS spending. Quinn is an outspoken industry commentator and widely recognized for translating complex cloud billing and infrastructure topics into clear, often humorous insights through his newsletter “Last Week in AWS,” his podcast “Screaming in the Cloud,” and his active presence on social media.

Keynote: "If I Were Starting Over"

The loudest message in tech right now is: get on board with AI immediately, or get left behind. I've lived through enough of these cycles to tell you what that message always is: a sales pitch. The good stuff waits for you. The urgency is manufactured, every time, by people with something to sell. I've mass-produced bad AWS decisions for ten years and good opinions about them for nearly as long—but I broke in on a ladder that's since had its bottom rungs sawn off of it.

The entry-level work that taught me the ropes is exactly what's being handed to AI first. So "here's how I did it" is useless to you now, because the world changed. This is the talk I wish someone had given me: how to start when the old path is closed, how to adapt to a world that's changing by the day, and which bets pay off no matter what the cycle is selling. Come for entertaining career advice that doesn't assume you started where I did, that's useful whether you're fifteen years deep or fifteen minutes in.