Post Syndicated from Ross Barich original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-the-latest-aws-heroes-august-2022/

The global AWS community is filled with passionate builders, eager to learn and explore ways to build better and faster on AWS. Within the AWS community, a select few individuals truly go above and beyond to share their knowledge and inspire others through content creation, event organization, open source contributions, and more. These community leaders are called AWS Heroes, and today we are thrilled to recognize the latest cohort:

Alexey Grigorev – Berlin, Germany

Machine Learning Hero Alexey Grigorev works as a principal data scientist at OLX and he runs DataTalks.Club, a community of 20,000+ data enthusiasts. He has written a few books about machine learning. One of them is Machine Learning Bookcamp, a book for software engineers who want to get into machine learning. A big fan of serverless and AWS Lambda, Alexey likes teaching how to use Lambda and other AWS services for Machine Learning model deployment. He lives in Berlin with his wife and son.

Allen Helton – McKinney, USA

Serverless Hero Allen Helton is a Cloud Architect at Tyler Technologies with a sharp focus on serverless-first development. He has been working in tech since 2012, after graduating with a B.S. in Software Engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas. Allen writes extensively about serverless on his blog Ready, Set, Cloud, where he shares everything from reference architectures to enterprise level production readiness tips. He also regularly engages on serverless topics on Twitter.

Liz Fong-Jones – Vancouver, Canada / Sydney, Australia

Community Hero Liz Fong-Jones is a developer advocate, labor and ethics organizer, and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) with 17+ years of experience. She is an advocate at Honeycomb for the SRE and Observability communities. She led implementation of Service-Level Objectives and adoption of Graviton2/Graviton3 at Honeycomb, and co-authored Observability Engineering. She has served on the OpenTelemetry governance committee and on the SREcon steering committee. She lives in Vancouver, BC with her wife Elly, partners, and a Samoyed/Golden Retriever mix, and in Sydney, NSW. She plays classical piano, leads an EVE Online alliance, and advocates for transgender rights.

Scott Hsieh – New Taipei City, Taiwan

Data Hero Scott Hsieh, also known as Shu-Jeng Hsieh, is a Data Architect at 104 Corporation. He has been sharing content on dev.to and Medium for nearly 2 years and has spoken at 6 events including AWS Summit Taiwan, re:Invent re:Cap, and DevAx::Alliance, mostly on data topics. He became an AWS Community Builder in the end of 2020 and achieved 10 AWS certifications within 1.5 years. Additionally, Scott has created 5 CDK constructs for 5 programming languages which in total are approaching 100K downloads. He is active in the AWS User Group Taiwan Facebook group, and enjoys helping people to grasp AWS services with ease and learning from experts across different fields.

 

 

If you’d like to learn more about the new Heroes, or connect with a Hero near you, please visit the AWS Heroes website or browse the AWS Heroes Content Library.

— Ross

Post Syndicated from Ross Barich original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/get-to-know-the-first-aws-heroes-of-2022/

The AWS Heroes program is a worldwide initiative which acknowledges individuals who have truly gone above and beyond to share knowledge in technical communities. AWS Heroes share knowledge by hosting events, Meetups, workshops, and study groups, or by authoring blogs, creating videos, speaking at conferences, or contributing to open source projects. You can see some of the Heroes’ work in the AWS Heroes Content Library.

Today we are excited to introduce the first new Heroes of 2022, including the first Hero based in the Czech Republic:

Albert Suwandhi – Medan, Indonesia

Community Hero Albert Suwandhi is an academic and IT Professional, and an AWS Champion Authorized Instructor who delivers AWS classroom training courses to AWS users and customers. He strongly believes in the power of community: he joined AWS User Group Indonesia, Medan chapter in 2019 and has since organized and delivered several sharing sessions. He has also been featured in number of tech talks, and his areas of cloud computing interest are cloud architecture and security. He enjoys helping people to realize the true potential of cloud computing and he runs a YouTube channel, which provides tutorials and tips & tricks related to AWS.

Dipali Kulshrestha – Delhi, India

Community Hero Dipali Kulshrestha is Vice President of Data Engineering at Natwest Group where she is an AWS trainer & mentor, conducting Cloud Practitioner and Solution Architect workshops every quarter. She is also an AWS Delhi User Group leader, hosts monthly immersive learning sessions on different AWS concepts, and is an active speaker at AWS community events. Dipali released a DevOps with AWS course on LinkedIn Learning, attended by 12000+ learners. She also created an AWS re:Skill series for containers on AWS. Dipali is huge advocate of diversity & inclusion of women in tech, and was recently featured in AWS India’s campaign called Developers of AWS and in a Tech Gig interview about cloud upskilling.

Faizal Khan – Hyderabad, India

Community Hero Faizal Khan is a tech entrepreneur, currently Founder & CEO at Ecomm.in and Xite Logic. He is an ardent contributor to the AWS community. As organizer of the AWS Hyderabad User Group, he helps organize AWS hackathons, AWS Meetups, re:Invent recaps, webinars, and AWS certification bootcamps. He is also a speaker at many events covering Networking, IoT, Storage, and Compute. His VPC masterclass on YouTube has garnered about half a million views. He was a core organizing member and host for the AWS Community Day South Asia 2021 Online, which attracted over 24K viewers. In addition, he built an AWS Q&A discussion forum for the community.

Filip Pyrek – Brno, Czech Republic

Serverless Hero Filip Pyrek is Serverless Architect at Purple Technology. At the age of 23 Filip is one of the youngest AWS Heroes. He started his serverless journey back in 2016 when he was 17 years old. He is helping grow the serverless community in Czech Republic and Slovakia by organizing Serverless Brno meetups, contributing to local podcasts, writing serverless blog posts in Czech language, and doing other evangelization activities. He is in touch with a community of maintainers and developers of serverless tooling projects and provides them with feedback, feature requests, and open-source contributions in order to continuously improve the serverless ecosystem.

Karolina Boboli – Warsaw, Poland

Community Hero Karolina Boboli works as an AWS Cloud Architect and Consultant. She has experience in cloud security, cloud governance, cost management, landing zones, serverless, and IoT. She created an online course “AWS in practice – your first project” about infrastructure as code. In 2019 she founded a vibrant cloud community – swiatchmury.pl – a Slack for cloud professionals focused on AWS – which she runs on a daily basis. The goal of the community is to have a friendly place to ask questions, inspire each other, and simply be together. From time to time she gives talks in AWS UG Poland and organizes her own webinars.

Masaya Arai – Kanagawa, Japan

Container Hero Masaya Arai is an 11x certified Tech Lead working for Nomura Research Institute (NRI). He is the central organizer of the JAWS-UG Container chapter (about 3000 registered members), an AWS user group in Japan, and he regularly contributes to activities in the AWS user community. Masaya wrote a commercial magazine called “AWS Container Guide + Hands-on”, which became a best-selling cloud-related book on amazon.co.jp, and published more than 10,000 copies. He focuses on promoting development of AWS container technologies through a wide variety of activities such as blogs, public presentations, contributing to magazines, and writing books. He truly enjoys sharing his knowledge and experience with others.

Mayank Pandey – Bengaluru, India

Community Hero Mayank Pandey is a cloud architect & teacher, helping both small and large organizations in their cloud adoption journey. He holds Professional & Specialty AWS Certifications and handles assignments including security & cost optimization on AWS, and cloud-native applications. Mayank is passionate about teaching and has done several classroom and online trainings. He is an active member of AWS community and contributes with hands-on demos and video tutorials to the YouTube channel – KnowledgeIndia. The YouTube channel has 65,000 subscribers and 150+ videos on various AWS topics.

Niv Yungelson – Tel Aviv, Israel

Community Hero Niv Yungelson works at Melio as the DevOps Team Lead. She is co-leader of the AWS Israel User Group, one of the biggest AWS User Groups in the world. As a community leader, she organizes Meetups and ensures they include underrepresented groups in the technology industry. She achieves this by both collaborating with other User Groups and experimenting with new initiatives. Niv also volunteers as an instructor in OpsSchool, which is a non-profit program meant to gather industry leaders to contribute together, train new DevOps engineers, and help the community continue the cycle of good deeds. She is active in tech user groups, forums, and Meetups, and is committed to sharing her knowledge and experience at any given opportunity.

 

 

 

If you’d like to learn more about the new Heroes, or connect with a Hero near you, please visit the AWS Heroes website or browse the AWS Heroes Content Library.

— Ross;

Post Syndicated from Ross Barich original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/meet-the-latest-aws-heroes-november-2021/

It is an exciting time of year, with AWS re:Invent right around the corner. As we reflect back on 2021, we continue to be impressed by the way AWS communities support one-another across intersecting journeys to expand technical skills. At the center of these communities are impactful leaders who go above and beyond to create educational content and facilitate peer-to-peer knowledge sharing across multiple channels. These passionate builders are called AWS Heroes, and we are humbled by the amazing activities they support on behalf of their communities. Today we are excited to introduce the latest cohort of AWS Heroes:

Juan Pan – Beijing, China

Data Hero Juan Pan (Trista) is the CTO and Co-Founder of SphereEx. She serves as an Apache ShardingSphere Project Management Committee member, as well as a mentor on various other Apache incubation projects. She was a recipient of the 2020 and 2021 “China OSCAR Open Source Pioneer” award, and frequently speaks at relevant conferences in the fields of databases & database architecture, including at AWS Summit Shanghai and AWS Dev Days. Juan loves to encourage more women to pursue careers in technology, and she regularly shares her empowering journey from open source contributor to CTO at events such as the AWS She Builds Summit.

Masanori Yamaguchi – Chiba, Japan

Community Hero Masanori Yamaguchi is a Solution Architect at KDDI Corporation. Yamaguchi joined the Japanese AWS User Group (JAWS-UG) in 2014 and has since managed 35 events including the reboot of Fin-JAWS (Financial-JAWS), and the JAWS-UG Chiba Chapter in 2019. Yamaguchi organized the 2021 JAWS-UG online event (JAWS DAYS 2021). This event was a new challenge in online events: not only delivering sessions, but also providing a place for attendees to communicate with each other and participate in AWS quizzes, games, and more. 4,000 participants from all over Japan attended the event. In recognition of these activities, he received the AWS Samurai 2020 Award.

Pamela Gotti – Milan, Italy

Community Hero Pamela Gotti is Chief Technology Officer at Credimi. She loves to design systems with clear boundaries through domain-driven design and event storming, and to bring them to life on Amazon EKS, with a mix of AWS Lambda, Amazon RDS, and Amazon S3. She has given talks about how Credimi uses AWS to implement new features, microservices communication approaches (from event-driven architecture to GraphQL), and about team organization. Since 2018 Pamela has led the tech team of SheTech, organizing events that help women build coding skills. The coding bootcamps focus on machine learning with Python, web development with JavaScript, and serverless.

Salah Elhossiny – Cairo, Egypt

Machine Learning Hero Salah Elhossiny works as an ML full stack developer, building backend and frontend solutions integrated with ML pipelines to provide intelligence for data labeling and analysis processes. Salah also builds serverless solutions on AWS integrated with ML models on Amazon SageMaker. A certified AWS ML specialist, Salah is an involved member of the AWS MENA Community, where he frequently writes summaries of AWS whitepapers to facilitate AWS certification exam preparation for fellow community members. He also enjoys writing about machine learning on Amazon SageMaker and serverless solutions.

Sheng Wu – Beijing, China

Container Hero Sheng Wu is a founding engineer at Tetrate. He serves on the world’s biggest open source foundation, The Apache Software Foundation, as a board director and mentor of the incubator. He is a regular speaker at conferences such as the AWS Summit, AWS Dev Day, QCon, KubeCon, and ApacheCon, typically sharing his expertise in observability for container-based and cloud-native environments. His articles and blogs on containers, cloud-native, and observability appear in media including The New Stack and the Apache SkyWalking Official Blog.

Takahiro Horike – Tokyo, Japan

Serverless Hero Takahiro Horike is CEO of Serverless Operations, Inc. While working in cloud computing, he participates in and contributes to the open source community, letting people know how fun and meaningful it is by speaking at AWS official events like AWS Dev Day. He also speaks at Japan AWS User Group (JAWS-UG) events. Horike has contributed to several open source projects on GitHub, including Serverless Step Functions. His nearly 40 presentations can be found on SlideShare and Speaker Deck.

Vanessa Santos – São Paulo, Brazil

Community Hero Vanessa Santos joined the AWS User Group São Paulo in 2017. Starting from a non-traditional technical background, she became recognized as an AWS Community Leader in 2019, achieving new learnings and practices through the AWS re:Invent We Power Tech Grant. Passionate about technology, Vanessa believes people can continuously learn and still be curious for more. She works with local and international AWS User Groups as an AWS UG São Paulo co-organizer, with female and black tech communities, as an MBA Lecturer, and as council volunteer for Brazilian health tech.

Vivek Raja P S – Madurai, India

Machine Learning Hero Vivek Raja works as Data Scientist at NexStem | CortexBCI Inc. He is an active speaker where he shares his learnings with AWS User Group India, at events such as AWS Community Day ANZ, and at various developer communities including the TensorFlow User Group, and Women in Data Science. He also supports AWS re:Skill with technical talks, podcasts, and open-source projects. Vivek regularly writes blogs where he shares about AWS Machine Learning and AWS DeepRacer. He is a DeepRacer enthusiast and uses it to help students learn Machine Learning by organizing regional AWS DeepRacer contests.

If you’d like to learn more about the new Heroes, or connect with a Hero near you, please visit the AWS Heroes website or browse the AWS Heroes Content Library.

— Ross;

Post Syndicated from Ross Barich original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-the-newest-aws-heroes-june-2021/

We at AWS continue to be impressed by the passion AWS enthusiasts have for knowledge sharing and supporting peer-to-peer learning in tech communities. A select few of the most influential and active community leaders in the world, who truly go above and beyond to create content and help others build better & faster on AWS, are recognized as AWS Heroes.

Today we are thrilled to introduce the newest AWS Heroes, including the first Heroes based in Perú and Ukraine:

Anahit Pogosova – Tampere, Finland

Data Hero Anahit Pogosova is a Lead Cloud Software Engineer at Solita. She has been architecting and building software solutions with various customers for over a decade. Anahit started working with monolithic on-prem software, but has since moved all the way to the cloud, nowadays focusing mostly on AWS Data and Serverless services. She has been particularly interested in the AWS Kinesis family and how it integrates with AWS Lambda. You can find Anahit speaking at various local and international events, such as AWS meetups, AWS Community Days, ServerlessDays, and Code Mesh. She also writes about AWS on Solita developers’ blog and has been a frequent guest on various podcasts.

Anurag Kale – Gothenburg, Sweden

Data Hero Anurag Kale is a Cloud Consultant at Cybercom Group. He has been using AWS professionally since 2017 and holds the AWS Solutions Architect – Associate certification. He is a co-organizer of the AWS User Group Pune; helping host and organize AWS Community Day Pune 2020 and AWS Community Day India 2020 – Virtual Edition. Anurag’s areas of interest include Amazon DynamoDB, relational databases, serverless data pipelines, data analytics, Infrastructure as Code, and sustainable cloud solutions. He is an active advocate of DynamoDB and Amazon Aurora, and has spoken at various national and international events such as AWS Community Day Nordics 2020 and various AWS Meetups.

Arseny Zinchenko – Kiev, Ukraine

Container Hero Arseny Zinchenko has over 15 years in IT, and currently works as a DevOps Team Lead and Data Security Officer at BetterMe Inc., a leading health & fitness mobile publisher. Since 2011 Arseny has used his blog to share expertise about DevOps, system administration, containerization, and cloud computing. Currently he is focused primary on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and security solutions provided by AWS. He is a member of the biggest Ukranian DevOps community, UrkOps, where he helps others to build their best with AWS and containers. where he helps others to build their best with AWS and containers. He also helps implement DevOps methodology in their organizations by using Amazon CloudFormation and AWS managed services like Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, and EKS.

Azmi Mengü – Istanbul, Turkey

Community Hero Azmi Mengü is a Sr. Software Engineer on the Infrastructure Team at Armut / HomeRun. He has over 5 years of AWS cloud development experience and has expertise in serverless, containers, data, and storage services. Since 2019, Azmi has been on the organizing committee of the Cloud and Serverless Turkey community. He co-organized and acted as a speaker at over 50 physical and online events during this time. He actively writes blog posts about developing serverless, container, and IaC technologies on AWS. Azmi also co-organized the first-ever ServerlessDays Istanbul in Turkey and AWS Community Day Turkey events.

Carlos Cortez – Lima, Perú

Community Hero Carlos Cortez is the founder and leader of AWS User Group Perú and Founder and CTO of CENNTI, which helps Peruvian companies in their difficult journey to the cloud and the development of Machine Learning solutions. The two biggest AWS events in Perú, AWS Community Day Lima 2019 and AWS UG Perú Conference in 2021, were organized by Carlos. He is the owner of the first AWS Podcast in Latam, “Imperio Cloud” and “Al día con AWS”. He loves to create content for emerging technologies, which is why he created DeepFridays to educate people in Reinforcement Learning.

Chris Miller – Santa Cruz, USA

Machine Learning Hero Chris Miller is an entrepreneur, inventor, and CEO of Cloud Brigade. After winning the 2019 AWS DeepRacer Summit race in Santa Clara, he founded the Santa Cruz DeepRacer Meetup group. Chris has worked with AWS AI/ML product teams with DeepLens and DeepRacer on projects including The Poopinator, and What’s in my Fridge. He prides himself on being a technical founder with experience across a broad range of disciplines, which has led to a lot of crazy projects in competitions and hackathons, such as an automated beer brewery, animatronic ventriloquist dummy, and his team even won a Cardboard Boat Race!

Gert Leenders – Brussels, Belgium

DevTools Hero Gert Leenders started his career as a developer in 2001. Eight years ago, his focus shifted entirely towards AWS. Today, he’s an AWS Cloud Solution Architect helping teams build and deploy cloud-native applications and manage their cloud infrastructure. On his blog, Gert emphasizes hidden gems in AWS developer tools and day-to-day topics for cloud engineers like logging, debugging, error handling and Infrastructure as Code. He also often shares code on GitHub.

Lei Wu – Beijing, China

Machine Learning Hero Lei Wu is head of the machine learning team at FreeWheel. He enjoys sharing technology with others, and he publishes many Chinese language tech blogs at infoQ, covering machine learning, big data, and distributed computing systems. Lei works hard to promote deep learning adoption with AWS services wherever he can, including talks at Spark Summit China, World Artificial Intelligence Conference, AWS Innovate AI/ML edition, and AWS re:Invent where he shared FreeWheel’s best practices on deep learning with Amazon SageMaker.

Hidetoshi Matsui – Hamamatsu, Japan

Serverless Hero Hidetoshi Matsui is a developer at Startup Technology Inc. and a member of the Japan AWS User Group (JAWS-UG). On “builders.flash,” a web magazine for developers run by AWS Japan, the articles he has contributed are among the most viewed pages on the site since 2020. His most impactful achievement is the construction of a distribution site for JAWS-UG’s largest event, JAWS DAYS 2021 re:Connect. He made full use of various AWS services to build a low-latency and scalable distribution system with a serverless architecture and smooth streaming video viewing for nearly 4000 participants.

Philipp Schmid – Nuremberg, Germany

Machine Learning Hero Philipp Schmid is a Machine Learning & Tech Lead at Hugging Face, working to democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science. He has extensive experience in deep learning, deploying NLP models into production using AWS Lambda, and is an avid advocate of Amazon SageMaker to simplify machine learning, such as “Distributed Training: Train BART/T5 for Summarization using Transformers and Amazon SageMaker.” He loves to share his knowledge on AI and NLP at various meetups such as Data Science on AWS, and on his technical Blog.

Simone Merlini – Milan, Italy

Community Hero Simone Merlini is CEO and CTO at beSharp. In 2012 he co-founded the first AWS User Group in Italy, and he’s currently the organizer of the AWS User Group Milan. He’s also actively involved in the development of Leapp, an open-source project for managing and securing Cloud access in multi-account environments. Simone is also the editor in chief and writer for Proud2beCloud, a blog aimed to share highly specialized AWS knowledge to enable the adoption of cloud technologies.

Virginie Mathivet – Lyon, France

Machine Learning Hero Virginie Mathivet has been leading the DataSquad team at TeamWork since 2017, focused on Data and Artificial Intelligence. Their purpose is to make the most of their clients’ data, via Data Science or Data Engineering / Big Data, mainly on AWS. Virginie regularly participates in conferences and writes books and articles, both for the public (introduction to AI) and for an informed audience (technical subjects). She also campaigns for a better visibility of women in the digital industry and for diversity in the data professions. Her favorite cloud service? Amazon SageMaker of course!

Walid A. Shaari – Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

Container Hero Walid A. Shaari is the community lead for the Dammam Cloud-native AWS User Group, working closely with CNCF ambassadors, K8saraby, and AWS MENA community leaders to enable knowledge sharing, collaboration, and networking. He helped organize the first AWS Community Day – MENA 2020. Walid also maintains GitHub content for Certified Kubernetes Administrators (CKA) and Certified Kubernetes Security Specialists (CKS), and holds several active professional certifications: AWS Certified Associate Solutions Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, Certified Kubernetes Application Developer, Red Hat Certified Architect level IV, and more.

 

 

 

 

If you’d like to learn more about the new Heroes, or connect with a Hero near you, please visit the AWS Hero website.

— Ross;

Post Syndicated from Ross Barich original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/meet-the-newest-aws-heroes-including-the-first-devtools-heroes/

The AWS Heroes program recognizes individuals from around the world who have extensive AWS knowledge and go above and beyond to share their expertise with others. The program continues to grow, to better recognize the most influential community leaders across a variety of technical disciplines.

Introducing AWS DevTools Heroes
Today we are introducing AWS DevTools Heroes: passionate advocates of the developer experience on AWS and the tools that enable that experience. DevTools Heroes excel at sharing their knowledge and building community through open source contributions, blogging, speaking, community organizing, and social media. Through their feedback, content, and contributions DevTools Heroes help shape the AWS developer experience and evolve the AWS DevTools, such as the AWS Cloud Development Kit, the AWS SDKs, and AWS Code suite of services.

The first cohort of AWS DevTools Heroes include:

Bhuvaneswari Subramani – Bengaluru, India

DevTools Hero Bhuvaneswari Subramani is Director Engineering Operations at Infor. With two decades of IT experience, specializing in Cloud Computing, DevOps, and Performance Testing, she is one of the community leaders of AWS User Group Bengaluru. She is also an active speaker at AWS community events and industry conferences, and delivers guest lectures on Cloud Computing for staff and students at engineering colleges across India. Her workshops, presentations, and blogs on AWS Developer Tools always stand out.

Jared Short – Washington DC, USA

DevTools Hero Jared Short is an engineer at Stedi, where they are using AWS native tooling and serverless services to build a global network for exchanging B2B transactions in a standard format. Jared’s work includes early contributions to the Serverless Framework. These days, his focus is working with AWS CDK and other toolsets to create intuitive and joyful developer experiences for teams on AWS.

Matt Coulter – Belfast, Northern Ireland

DevTools Hero Matt Coulter is a Technical Architect for Liberty IT, focused on creating the right environment for empowered teams to rapidly deliver business value in a well-architected, sustainable, and serverless-first way. Matt has been creating this environment by building CDK Patterns, an open source collection of serverless architecture patterns built using AWS CDK that reference the AWS Well Architected Framework. Matt also created CDK Day, which was the first community driven, global conference focused on everything CDK (AWS CDK, CDK for Terraform, CDK for Kubernetes, and others).

Paul Duvall – Washington DC, USA

DevTools Hero Paul Duvall is co-founder and former CTO of Stelligent. He is principal author of “Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk,” and is also the author of many other publications including “Continuous Compliance on AWS,” “Continuous Encryption on AWS,” and “Continuous Security on AWS.” Paul hosted the DevOps on AWS Radio podcast for over three years and has been an enthusiastic user and advocate of AWS Developer Tools since their respective releases.

Sebastian Korfmann – Hamburg, Germany

DevTools Hero Sebastian Korfmann is an entrepreneurial Software Engineer with a current focus on Cloud Tooling, Infrastructure as Code, and the Cloud Development Kit (CDK) ecosystem in particular. He is a core contributor to the CDK for Terraform project, which enables users to define infrastructure using TypeScript, Python, and Java while leveraging the hundreds of providers and thousands of module definitions provided by Terraform and the Terraform ecosystem. With cdk.dev, Sebastian co-founded a community-driven hub for all things CDK, and he runs a weekly newsletter covering the growing CDK ecosystem.

Steve Gordon – East Sussex, United Kingdom

DevTools Hero Steve Gordon is a Pluralsight author and senior engineer who is passionate about community and all things .NET related, having worked with .NET for over 16 years. Steve has used AWS extensively for five years as a platform for running .NET microservices. He blogs regularly about running .NET on AWS, including deep dives into how the .NET SDK works, building cloud-native services, and how to deploy .NET containers to Amazon ECS. Steve founded .NET South East, a .NET Meetup group based in Brighton.

Thorsten Höger – Stuttgart, Germany

DevTools Hero Thorsten Höger is CEO and cloud consultant at Taimos, where he is advising customers on how to use AWS. Being a developer, he focuses on improving development processes and automating everything to build efficient deployment pipelines for customers of all sizes. As a supporter of open-source software, Thorsten is maintaining or contributing to several projects on GitHub, like test frameworks for AWS Lambda, Amazon Alexa, or developer tools for AWS. He is also the maintainer of the Jenkins AWS Pipeline plugin and one of the top three non-AWS contributors to AWS CDK.

 

 

 

 

Meet the rest of the new AWS Heroes
There is more good news! We are thrilled to introduce the remaining new AWS Heroes in this cohort, including the first Heroes from Argentina, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia:

Ahmed Samir – Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Community Hero Ahmed Samir is a Cloud Architect and mentor with more than 12 years of experience in IT. He is the leader of three Arabic Meetups in Riyadh: AWS, Amazon SageMaker, and Kubernetes, where he has organized and delivered over 40 Meetup events. Ahmed frequently shares knowledge and evangelizes AWS in Arabic through his social media accounts. He also holds AWS and Kubernetes certifications.

Anas Khattar – Beirut, Lebanon

Community Hero Anas Khattar is co-founder of Digico Solutions. He founded the AWS User Group Lebanon in 2018 and coordinates monthly meetups and workshops on a variety of cloud topics, which helped grow the group to more than 1,000 AWSome members. He also regularly speaks at tech conferences and authors tech blogs on Dev Community, sharing his AWS experiences and best practices. In close collaboration with the regional AWS community leaders and builders, Anas organized AWS Community Day MENA, which started in September 2020 with 12 User Groups from 10 countries, and hosted 27 speakers over 2 days.

Chris Gong – New York, USA

Community Hero Chris Gong is constantly exploring the different ways that cloud services can be applied in game development. Passionate about sharing his knowledge with the world, he routinely creates tutorials and educational videos on his YouTube channel, Flopperam, where the primary focus has been AWS Game Tech and Unreal Engine, specifically the multiplayer and networking aspects of game development. Although Amazon GameLift has been his biggest interest, Chris has plans to cover the usage of other AWS services in game development while exploring how they can be integrated with other game engines besides Unreal Engine.

Damian Olguin – Cordoba, Argentina

Community Hero Damian Olguin is a tech entrepreneur and one of the founders of Teracloud, an AWS APN Partner. As a community leader, he promotes knowledge-sharing experiences in user communities within LATAM. He is co-organizer of AWS User Group Cordoba and co-host of #DeepFridays, a Twitch streaming show that promotes AI/ML technology adoption by playing with DeepRacer, DeepLens, and DeepComposer. Damian is a public speaker who has spoken at AWS Community Day Buenos Aires 2019, AWS re:Invent 2019, and AWS Community Day LATAM 2020.

Denis Bauer – Sydney, Australia

Data Hero Denis Bauer is a Principal Research Scientist at Australia’s government research agency (CSIRO). Her open source products include VariantSpark, the Machine Learning tool for analysing ultra-high dimensional data, which was the first AWS Marketplace health product from a public sector organization. Denis is passionate about facilitating the digital transformation of the health and life-science sector by building a strong community of practice through open source technology, keynote presentations, and inclusive interdisciplinary collaborations. For example, the collaboration with her organization’s visionary Scientific Computing and Cloud Platforms experts as well as AWS Data Hero Lynn Langit has enabled the creation of cloud-based bioinformatics solutions used by 10,000 researchers annually.

Denis Dyack – St. Catharines, Canada

Community Hero Denis Dyack, a video game industry veteran of more than 30 years, is the Founder and CEO of Apocalypse Studios. His studio evangelizes using a cloud-first approach in game development and partners with AWS Game Tech to move the medium of the games industry forward. In his years of experience speaking at games conferences and within AWS communities, Denis has been an advocate for building on Amazon Lumberyard and more recently in moving over game development pipelines to AWS.

Emrah Şamdan – Ankara, Turkey

Serverless Hero Emrah Şamdan is the VP of Products at Thundra. In order to expand the serverless community globally in a pandemic, he co-organized the quarterly held ServerlessDays Virtual. He’s also a local community organizer for AWS Community Day Turkey, ServerlessDays Istanbul, and bi-weekly meetups at Cloud and Serverless Turkey. He’s currently part of the core organizer team of global ServerlessDays and is continuously looking for ways to expand the community. He frequently writes about serverless and cloud-native microservices on Medium and on the Thundra blog.

Franck Pachot – Lausanne, Switzerland

Data Hero Franck Pachot is the Principal Consultant and Database Evangelist at dbi services (an AWS Select Partner) and is passionate about all databases. With over 20 years of experience in development, data modeling, infrastructure, and all DBA tasks, Franck is a recognized database expert across Oracle and AWS. Franck is also an AWS Academy educator for Powercoders, and holds AWS Certified Database Specialty and Oracle Certified Master certifications. Franck contributes to technical communities, educating customers on AWS Databases through his blog, Twitter, and podcast in French. He is active in the Data community, and enjoys talking and meeting other data enthusiasts at conferences.

Hiroko Nishimura – Washington DC, USA

Community Hero Hiroko Nishimura (Hiro) is the founder of AWS Newbies and Cloud Newbies, which help people with non-traditional technical backgrounds begin their explorations into the AWS Cloud. As a “career switcher” herself, she has been community building since 2018 to help others deconstruct Cloud Computing jargon so they, too, can begin a career in the Cloud. Finally putting her degrees in Special Education to good use, Hiro teaches “Introduction to AWS for Non-Engineers” courses at LinkedIn Learning, and introductory coding lessons at egghead.

Juliano Cristian – Santa Catarina, Brazil

Community Hero Juliano Cristian is CEO of Game Business Accelerator Academy and co-founder of Game Developers SC which participates in the AWS APN program. He organizes the AWS Game Tech Lumberyard User Group in Florianópolis, Brazil, holding Meetups, Practical Labs, Game Jams, and Workshops. He also conducts many lectures at universities, speaking with more than 90 educational institutions across Brazil, introducing students to cloud computing and AWS Game Tech services. Whenever he can, Juliano also participates in other AWS User Groups in Brazil and Latin America, working to build an increasingly motivated and productive community.

Jungyoul Yu – Seoul, Korea

Machine Learning Hero Jungyoul Yu works at Danggeun Market as a DevOps Engineer, and is a leader of the AWS DeepRacer Group, part of the AWS Korea User Group. He was one of the AWS DeepRacer League finalists in AWS Summit Seoul and AWS re:Invent 2019. Starting off with zero ML experience, Jungyoul used AWS DeepRacer to learn ML techniques and began sharing his learnings both in the AWS DeepRacer Community, with User Groups, at AWS Community Day, and at various meetups. He has also shared many blog posts and sample code such as DeepRacer Reward Function Simulator, Rank Notifier, and Auto submit bot.

Juv Chan – Singapore

Machine Learning Hero Juv Chan is an AI automation engineer at UBS. He is the AWS DeepRacer League Singapore Summit 2019 champion and a re:Invent Championship Cup 2019 finalist. He is the lead organizer for the AWS DeepRacer Beginner Challenge global virtual community race in 2020. Juv is also involved in sharing his DeepRacer and Machine Learning knowledge with the AWS Machine Learning community at both global and regional scale. Juv is a contributing writer for both Towards Data Science and Towards AI platforms, where he blogs about AWS AI/ML and cloud relevant topics.

Lukonde Mwila – Johannesburg, South Africa

Container Hero Lukonde Mwila is a Senior Software Engineer at Entelect. He has a passion for sharing knowledge through speaking engagements such as meetups and tech conferences, as well as writing technical articles. His talk at DockerCon 2020 on deploying multi-container applications to AWS was one of the top rated and most viewed sessions of the event. He is 3x AWS certified and is an advocate for containerization and serverless technologies. Lukonde enjoys sharing experiences of building out AWS infrastructure on Medium and sharing open source projects on GitHub for the developer community to easily consume, replicate, and improve for their own benefit.

Magdalena Zawada – Rybnik, Poland

Community Hero Magdalena Zawada is Director of Strategy and Expansion at LCloud Ltd. She has been working in IT for 11 years and started her adventure with AWS technology in 2013 as CEO of Hostersi Ltd. Magdalena willingly shares her knowledge and experience with the community, co-organizing AWS UG Warsaw meetings. She also organizes a series of events to support preparation for obtaining AWS Cloud Practitioner Certifications. Magdalena belongs to numerous industry organizations, including FinOps Foundation and ISSA Information Systems Security Association Poland, and in 2019 she was a participant of the AWS re:Invent Community Leader “We Power Tech” Diversity Grant in Las Vegas.

Nick Walter – Lincoln, USA

Data Hero Nick Walter has over 15 years of experience with enterprise IT solutions, including expertise and certifications in AWS, VMware, and Oracle. A passionate evangelist for data management solutions on AWS, Nick can often be found blogging, hosting webinars, or presenting at conferences regarding the latest trends in business critical database technologies. Recently, Nick has focused on helping clients find cost effective ways to handle both the technical and licensing challenges of migrating application stacks backed by commercial database engines, such as Oracle or MS SQL Server, into AWS.

Renato Losio – Berlin, Germany

Data Hero Renato Losio is the Principal Cloud Architect at Funambol, a provider of white label cloud services. He has been working with AWS technologies since 2011, and holds 7 AWS certifications (including the Database Specialty). Renato enjoys speaking at international events, including DevOps Pro Europe, DevOpsConf Russia, All Day DevOps, Codemotion, and Percona Live. Passionate about knowledge sharing, Renato is an editor at InfoQ and writes about different cloud-related topics on his blog, cloudiamo.com. Through his various platforms, he has covered different topics across AWS Databases, such as Amazon RDS Proxy, Amazon RDS, and Amazon Aurora.

Tomasz Lakomy – Poznan, Poland

Community Hero Tomasz Lakomy is a Senior Frontend Engineer at OLX Group, and an egghead.io instructor. Over the last two years, he’s been diving into the world of AWS and sharing what he’s learned with others. After passing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect: Associate exam in 2019 he has recorded multiple courses on serverless technologies, including “Build an App with the AWS Cloud Development Kit” and “Learn AWS Lambda from Scratch.” In addition, he’s active on his Twitter, blog (tlakomy.com), as well as The Practical Dev community, where he posts articles on career advice, testing and – of course – AWS.
 

 

 

 

If you’d like to learn more about the new Heroes, or connect with a Hero near you, please visit the AWS Hero website.

— Ross;