Becoming an AWS (Serverless) Hero

#aws #serverless #learning #community

Introduction

In the beginning of November 2024, I was named AWS Serverless Hero. I decided to write a small article series to reflect AWS journey of me and the company ip.labs from the perspective of my public contributions. In this part of the series, I mainly focused on the art of contributions that I accomplished followed by some general advice how I found out to effectively contribute to the AWS community. If I have time in the future I’ll break those contributions down in more detail in the subsequent part.

This article isn’t named “How to become AWS Hero” as I don’t exactly know how such nominations work as the process isn’t public and you can’t nominate yourself. To be honest, I dreamed to become AWS Hero, but I wasn’t obsessed about it. I have been focusing on contributing to the AWS community and making an impact. Everything else wasn’t in my hands. And when I finally became AWS Hero, I was simply over the moon, and it took time for me to realize it. But still, the same holds true: I still focus on my contribution and impact.

Reflecting on my AWS journey

My and ip.labs journey to the AWS Cloud began in early 2017 as we due to multiple reasons decided to migrate from our datacenters to the AWS cloud and modernize our solutions along the way. My colleague Firdaws Aboulaye and I briefly summarized this journey in our talk Highly Scalable Image Storage with AWS Serverless which we have given at several conferences including the GoTo. We finished migrating all our applications to the AWS cloud in 2021 and closed the last datacenter (others have been closed earlier). In 2018, parallel to the migration, we started experimenting with AWS Serverless technologies, being an early adopter of Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, SQS, SNS, StepFunctions and later EventBridge in Europe. Since then, we have built the entire applications with these technologies. My colleague Firdaws and I are also currently presenting lessons learned and challenges of one of such a project in the article series Highly scalable image storage solution with AWS Serverless at ip.labs. As ip.labs exists for 20 years we also have classical AWS stack with ALB, EC2, EBS and EFS, and also use Docker Container with ECS and ECS with Fargate for the certain use cases. This is about the journey of ip.labs.

Now a bit about myself: I’m currently 45 years old and a Head of Development at ip.labs. I’m an introvert and my first public speaking activity was at the age of….37… when we had expected our 3rd child, and I basically had a lot of other stuff to do 😊. So, it was in 2016. My first talk was about some specific Java topic (Java Memory Model) given at one of the local conferences with my former-colleague Rodion. It’s was subject of my separate blog post why I decided to give a public talk at all that you can read here.

In the middle of 2018, I gave my first AWS related talk where my colleague Elmar and I described how we build a production-ready application with AWS Serverless technologies within 3 weeks without having a prior knowledge about these technologies. Now moving forward to the end of 2024, I gave around 125 AWS-related talks (some of them were online talks, especially during Corona). Many of them I did with my colleagues reflecting on some aspect of the company’s journey. But I also talk about running Java on Lambda including building web application with frameworks like Spring Boot 3 which is the topic of my private research as we still have a lot of Java code but not so much dealing with Java runtime on Lambda. He comes my first advice: find contribution topics that you are passionate about, but they should at least partially correspond to what you’re doing in your daily life (as an employee, consultant or whatsoever) and you should enjoy experimenting with these things. For me they became: AWS Serverless in general (individual Serverless services, their hard parts and challenges, Serverless operations) and Java on AWS Serverless. I sometimes speak about AI topics and might do this more frequently in the future. For you it might be something else : all kind of containers and orchestrators, including EKS, AWS Networking, Machine Learning, Generative AI and DevOps to mention just a few.

As I also give talks about Java on AWS Serverless, I’m a frequent speaker not only at the AWS or Serverless related events (conferences, Community Days, meetups), but also at the Java ones. It gave me the possibility to diversify my speaking activities. I’m also doing workshops (like about Amazon DevOps Guru service) and I’m a frequent guest on many AWS-related podcasts and webinars. These are subcategories of public speaking activities.

There are, of course many other ways to contribute besides the previously mentioned public speaking activities. You can:

write books
write articles for the specialized (online) magazines
post articles online on your personal web page, blog sites like dev.to, Medium, Hashnode or others
be a AWS Community Leader and organize local meetups but also global AWS-related events like AWS Community Days or Serverless Days (which generally also accept presentations about other Cloud providers or platforms)
host a podcast
have your own YouTube channel where you frequently post videos
be actively engaged in the relevant social medias like Twitter, Bluesky, or LinkedIn
be involved in the open source communities, contributing to the projects

So, as you see, there are really many ways to contribute, but most of us can’t do it all in parallel. Focus on what you are passionate about and what is doing for you. My favorite one was always public speaking at the conferences and meetups.

But what else did I do or am still doing? I’m personally very active in the social medias like X/Twitter and LinkedIn since 2017 or so, posting about my topics of interest and general architectural topics, also promoting my own content (talks and articles) there. I could grow my audience quite a bit, currently having 17K+ followers on my LinkedIn account and 37k+ on my X/Twitter account and now started my Bluesky journey.

In 2022, 6 years after my first public speaking activity, I finally decided to start blogging to improve my writing skills. I didn’t and still don’t have my personal web page (maybe I’ll start one later) and decided to go with dev.to (also because I could publish my articles as AWS Community Builder). Until now I’ve already published 85+ articles on my personal dev.to page having 14k+ followers after only 2 years. I also previously published articles in the German Java Magazine which they also re-publish online on their learning platforms but did it more frequently in the last 2 years: 1 article in 2023, 3 in 2024 and several already planned for 2025.

Especially due to my public speaking activities and published articles I was contacted by various related AWS service teams. They asked my opinion about certain future directions of the AWS service development and asked for my feedback about the services themselves and the area of their improvement. It have been very pleasant experiences for me to get in touch with those people at AWS who actually were behind those services. I have not written any books yet but was one of the reviewers of the book Learning Serverless: Design, Develop, and Deploy with Confidence by Jason Katzer published by O’Reilly. I also gave an online course related to AWS Serverless on the Oreilly Learning platform several years ago. I’m also currently not engaged in any open-source projects but post step by step examples for my articles on my private GitHub account. I also don't organize any AWS-related events anymore. I started Serverless meetup Bonn in 2019, but after 4 meetups we paused due to Corona and never restarted (also because of the lack of interest of the attendees in our region). Though I’m one of the co-organizers of the be-monthly Java User Group Bonn from the beginning in 2017 (already 40+ meetups) which is very well attended where I have also presented several times my AWS Serverless Java related talks. But Java User Group isn’t an AWS-related event. I also don’t host any podcasts nor do I currently have my YouTube channel.

I presented you my contribution categories as of now and once again encourage you to carefully choose yours. And once again: don’t exaggerate and start doing everything at the same time. Try out what works for you and what you enjoy most. And if something becomes more like routine for you, you can add or remove other categories.

By the way, if your talks get rejected by the conference organizers, keep trying to apply, but maybe do some small changes to the title and abstractions (there is plenty of material on how to write the good ones). My talks were rejected far more times than accepted. Also, my company is relatively unknown for the most people (we’re mainly in the B2B area) and we’re not operating at the hyperscale. So, it’s totally understandable that the organizers of the bigger conferences generally prefer topics and use cases to be presented by the known companies (and famous speakers) which act on a much bigger scale. But there are also enough conferences which give a chance to first-time speakers as well. But I have never felt discouraged because of rejections and kept trying (with relative success as you can see). Even if there are still some conferences where I’d to speak at but haven’t managed to do so yet after trying for many years applying different talks. But I will keep trying as you might think 😊.

In case of frequent rejections, you can also start writing your blog post on your own as nobody can prevent you from publishing them 😊. You can then collect and incorporate feedback from your readers and use it as a starting point to create talks based on your blog posts. I did it in both directions: first talks and the blog post and vice versa.

In 2020 I became AWS Community Builder with the first cohort and was a part of this amazing program until now (being in the 5 year), but as I can’t be AWS Community Builder and AWS Hero at the same time I have now left this program which gave me a lot of learning and networking opportunities, but also opportunities to present and promote my content. I really enjoyed it and if you are not a part of it yet, check out the page AWS Community Builders, as the current nomination is already started and you can apply until January 20th.

Summary and conclusions

In this article, I briefly presented my AWS journey so far focusing on my contributions topics and contribution categories and encourage you to start your own AWS journey. Focus on your contribution and impact not on titles (AWS Community Builder or AWS Hero). This might follow naturally or not; it might come quickly or not at all. I became AWS Hero after contributing for 6+ years.

But I also realized that I have built my personal brand in parallel thanks to my contributions and you can do it too! You may become the recognized expert who is invited to present at the famous conferences (some of them don’t even have call for papers and are invite-only). And this is also a huge recognition (at least for me). You can also establish connections to other well-known industry experts (for example at the conferences or as they comment on your blogpost), exchange your experience and learn from them. And I realized how much I learned in the last 8 years or so by having left my comfort zone. You can also receive job offers more frequently because of your visibility and connections, if you’re open for the new opportunities. But this all is maybe the topic for the second part of this series.

Everything being said does also apply to non-AWS-related programs: Java community has Champions, Docker has Captains, CNCF has Ambassadors and so on. So, if you’re passionate about some other piece of technology, there are plenty of the similar opportunities out there as well. Just start contributing whatever it is! Everybody has something to share!