All posts by Taylor Jacobsen

Introducing the newest Heroes of the year – March 2024

Post Syndicated from Taylor Jacobsen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-the-newest-heroes-of-the-year-march-2024/

AWS Heroes are inspirational thought leaders who go above and beyond to knowledge share in a variety of ways. You can find them speaking at local meetups, AWS Community Days, or even at re:Invent. And these technical experts are never done learning—they’re passionate about solving problems and creating content to enable the community to build faster on AWS. We’re excited to announce the first cohort of Heroes in 2024…

Let’s give a round of applause to our new Heroes!

Awedis Keofteian – Beirut, Lebanon

Community Hero Awedis Keofteian is a DevOps Engineer at Anghami. He has a strong background in DevOps practices, and he leverages modern technologies to enhance scalability, reliability, and efficiency in Anghami’s cloud-based architecture. His journey began as an AWS Community Builder, and over time, he took the helm as the leader of the AWS User Group in Beirut. Awedis is passionate about nurturing and supporting the growth of AWS communities, and shares his knowledge across DevOps, automation, serverless, and cloud technologies.

Daniel Aniszkiewicz – Wrocław, Poland

Security Hero Daniel Aniszkiewicz is a Senior Software Engineer at Algoteque International Hub. He co-organizes the Wrocław AWS User Group, and is passionate about contributing to the growth and engagement of the local AWS community. Daniel is also a seasoned speaker and loves to share his knowledge with others, such as presenting at re:Invent, AWS meetups, and AWS Community Days. He is particularly focused on promoting Amazon Verified Permissions and Cedar through workshops, blog posts, IaC templates, and open source projects.

Hazel Sáenz – Guatemala

Serverless Hero Hazel Sáenz is a Software Architect at Cognits. Her primary focus is modernizing on-premises applications to cloud environments using AWS, and predominantly designs high workload architectures in serverless frameworks. Hazel enjoys sharing her knowledge with the community through technical talks at local and international events, participating in AWS Summits, AWS Community Days, and meetups, as well as writing technical articles in both English and Spanish. Additionally, she is the leader of the AWS User Group Guatemala, where she excels at organizing inclusive events and sharing her knowledge with the community.

Kenta Goto – Tokyo, Japan

DevTools Hero Kenta Goto is a Backend Tech Lead and an enthusiastic contributor to AWS CDK. He has been selected as a top contributor and a trusted reviewer in AWS CDK, and serves as a maintainer for the community-driven CDK Construct Library. Kenta is also a conference speaker, having presented at the AWS Dev Day in Japan in 2022 and 2023. Furthermore, he actively contributes to the open source community by developing and publishing his self-made AWS tools and AWS CDK Construct libraries, which are used worldwide.

Martin Damovsky – Prague, Czech Republic

Community Hero Martin Damovsky is a Cloud Governance Lead at Ataccama.com, an AWS Partner providing Unified Data Management Solutions. He has been particularly interested in AWS Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform, Cloud Intelligence Dashboard, and security and govern tools, such as AWS Security Hub, Amazon GuardDuty, and AWS Config. Martin is a leader for AWS User Group Prague, and he enjoys sharing his knowledge with the greater AWS community through his blog and speaking at meetups, podcasts, and conferences.

Rafał Mituła – Warsaw, Poland

Community Hero Rafał Mituła is a Cloud Data Engineer and Architect within the Data & AI division at Chaos Gears. He is actively involved in the AWS community, co-organizing the AWS User Group Warsaw meetups and the AWS Community Day Poland conference. In addition to his technical and organizational roles, Rafał shares his expertise by speaking at conferences and leading workshops aimed at introducing new builders to AWS and data analytics, such as the AWS Data Engineering Immersion Days.

Sena Yakut – Izmir, Turkey

Security Hero Sena Yakut is a Senior Cloud Security Engineer at Lyrebird Studio. She has a master’s degree in cloud security, and builds security requirements for architectural designs, providing threat management and security concepts and services using AWS. Sena shares her knowledge through blog posts across various platforms, and engaging in discussions about cloud security at events, such as AWS Community Day Türkiye, and DevOpsDays Istanbul. As an active blogger and speaker, she enjoys learning new security features on AWS and informing others about them.

Tiago Rodrigues – Lisbon, Portugal

Community Hero Tiago Rodrigues is a Senior Cloud Consultant at tecRacer.com, an AWS Premier Partner and AWS Advanced Training Partner. He specializes in migrations from on-premises environments to the cloud, as well as modernizing architectures and implementing serverless solutions. Beyond his role, Tiago is deeply committed to knowledge sharing and actively contributes to the AWS community through engagements, such as the AWS User Group Lisbon, educational workshops, and guest lectures at universities. He is passionate about education and innovation, and developed an open source mobile app, AWSary, which is an AWS dictionary designed to provide solution architect diagram drawings and quick insights into AWS services.

Learn More

Please visit the AWS Heroes website if you’d like to learn more about the AWS Heroes program or to connect with a Hero near you.

— Taylor

Meet the final cohort of AWS Heroes this year – November 2023

Post Syndicated from Taylor Jacobsen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/meet-the-final-cohort-of-aws-heroes-this-year-november-2023/

As 2023 comes to an end, we’re celebrating our final Heroes cohort launch of the year! These technical experts are passionate about helping their local communities build faster on AWS—they’re focused on sharing best practices, solving problems, and even more. We’re thrilled to have them join the AWS Heroes program, and recognizing them for their contributions to the greater AWS community.

Please meet our newest Heroes!

Emin Alemdar – Izmir, Turkey

Container Hero Emin Alemdar is a Solutions Architect at Spacelift where he produces solutions related to Kubernetes, Cloud technologies, and Cloud Native Transformation. In general, his work focuses on these services and technologies, and he shares best practices with the AWS community. Additionally, Emin is a CNCF Ambassador and is part of the HashiCorp Ambassador Program within the open source community.

Richard Fan – Hong Kong

Security Hero Richard Fan is a Security Engineer at ExpressVPN. He is dedicated to helping builders easily adopt AWS, and shares best practices around streamlines for cloud governance. Richard has also developed different tools to simplify the experience with AWS security services, such as his nitro-enclave-python-demo project, which helps builders get started on AWS Nitro Enclaves and has been adopted by some AWS workshops. Furthermore, Richard promotes the concept and use cases of enclave technology by partnering with multiple companies to review their AWS Nitro Enclaves offering.

Takuya Tachibana – Misawa, Japan

Community Hero Takuya Tachibana is the CEO of Heptagon inc. and Director of DigitalCube Co. Ltd. Since 2012, he has been contributing to the Japan AWS User Group (JAWS-UG), and he was the leader from 2016-2017 for all of the JAWS-UGs, representing and overseeing every chapter in Japan. Tachibana has been a speaker at over 100 community and cloud events throughout all of Japan, including AWS Summit Seoul, AWS Summit Beijing, and AWS Community Day APAC.

Learn More

To learn more about the AWS Heroes program or to connect with a Hero near you, please visit the AWS Heroes website.

— Taylor

The newest AWS Heroes are here – September 2023

Post Syndicated from Taylor Jacobsen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/the-newest-aws-heroes-are-here-september-2023/

Each quarter, the AWS Heroes program recognizes technical enthusiasts who lift up the greater AWS community through various approaches. While these inspirational individuals are driven to knowledge share, they sometimes discover novel and fun ways of using technology, such as leveraging LEDs to create a magical display of holiday lights. Many are also contributing heavily in their local communities by leading user groups, bootcamps, and workshops, speaking at conferences to share solutions, and beyond.

Without further ado, we’re eager to introduce the latest cohort of Heroes to the world—let’s give them a grand welcome!

Alex Lau – Hong Kong

Community Hero Alex Lau is a Lead Instructor of Tecky Academy with a focus on full stack, mobile apps, and AWS technologies. Enthusiastic about teaching and sharing, Alex has been an active leader in the Hong Kong developer community since 2015. He has organized annual hackathons and founded a coding bootcamp, growing the community to over 1,000 members. Earlier this year, he took the stage at the AWS Summit Hong Kong to introduce the cutting edge of AWS technologies, and also led a session during the Hong Kong AWS GenAI Solution Day.

Brian H. Hough– Boston, USA

DevTools Hero Brian H. Hough is the founder of the Tech Stack Playbook®, a software engineering firm serving enterprise and startup clients, and a media brand with over 10k+ followers. His talks, presentations, and work have been featured by AWS, freeCodeCamp, MongoDB, and NASA. Brian has also served as a mentor for AWS’ All Builders Welcome Grant Program and other tech communities, as he enjoys lifting up the voices of builders and empowering everyone to build the future they want to see in the world. In addition, he has spoken about full-stack development, microservices, MLOps, and Infrastructure as Code at conferences including, AWS re:Invent, AWS Summit New York, Geekle’s Worldwide Software Architecture Summit, DataSaturday, and more.

Dheeraj Choudhary – Maharashtra, India

Community Hero Dheeraj Choudhary is a lead engineer focused on the AWS cloud and the DevOps domain with over 10+ years of IT experience. He specializes in DevOps and build and release engineering, and software configuration management. As an AWS User Group Pune leader, he is passionate about co-organizing physical meetups and AWS Community Days. Additionally, Dheeraj is an active international speaker at AWS community events, and conducts guest lectures and workshops on AWS cloud computing at colleges and universities in Pune.

Evandro Pires – Blumenau, Brazil

Serverless Hero Evandro Pires is a CTO who started programming when he was 12 years old. His background is in technology and entrepreneurship, and he has led important projects in internet and mobile banking, and AI and low code for SaaS solutions. Since 2020, Evandro founded and hosts a podcast dedicated to serverless called, “Sem Servidor.” Evandro is also the organizer of the first ServerlessDays in LATAM.

Kazuki Miura – Hokkaido, Japan

Community Hero Kazuki Miura is a senior engineer at Hokkaido Television Broadcasting Co., Ltd. (HTB). He is involved in the development and operation of the company’s video on demand service and e-commerce service. Kazuki continues to share his knowledge gained through the development of web services widely with the Japanese AWS User Group (JAWS-UG).

Linda Mohamed – Vienna, Austria

Community Hero Linda Mohamed has been navigating the tech landscape for over a decade. She is currently at EBCONT where her primary focus and specialization is in cloud technologies, IT process optimization, and agile methodologies. Linda also holds the title of Chairperson for the AWS Community DACH Support Association, and is an active member of a funding advisory board. When she is not guiding companies on their cloud journey, she is diving into AI/ML services and technologies, and sharing her insights at AWS community events and other tech platforms.

Monica Colangelo– Milan, Italy

DevTools Hero Monica Colangelo is a principal cloud architect with 15-years in the IT industry. Her experience spans across operations, infrastructure, and notably, DevOps. Automation and operational excellence have always been central to her work, guiding her approach and solutions. Monica is also a regular speaker at tech conferences, sharing her expertise and insights. Furthermore, she is an advocate for diversity and emphasizes the need for a stronger representation of women in the tech sector.

Nick Triantafillou – Wollongong, Australia

Community Hero Nick Triantafillou is a cloud engineer, educator, User Group founder, and Christmas Light enthusiast. He was one of the original course instructors at the cloud education startup A Cloud Guru, having taught over 1 million students the fundamentals of AWS, and produced the world’s first AWS Certified DevOps Engineer course. He is also the founder of his local Wollongong AWS User Group, co-founder of the Sydney Serverless Meetup, and has assisted in the planning and operation of both the ServerlessConf and ServerlessDays ANZ conferences. He currently runs “NickExplainsAWS,” where he is attempting to make a video about every single AWS service on TikTok and YouTube. In addition, every December Nick brings traffic to a standstill by installing over 75,000 LEDs on his house for his serverless, AWS powered light show spectacular.

Learn More

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.

— Taylor

Introducing the first AWS Security Heroes

Post Syndicated from Taylor Jacobsen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-the-first-aws-security-heroes/

The AWS Heroes program recognizes individuals who combine their deeply technical expertise with a passion for helping others to learn more and build faster. Over the years, trends have evolved in how the community develops and deploys solutions built on AWS, which has influenced the creation of specialized Hero categories. Today, we’re thrilled to officially recognize and acknowledge leaders in the security area of focus.

Security is often looked at in terms of impact and not how it enables teams to safely innovate. Our inaugural AWS Security Heroes have shown time and time again that a pragmatic approach, executed with the intent to inform and educate, delivers positive security outcomes. The initial cohort of AWS Security Heroes are experts at the forefront of their field, and share a mission to help others better understand security.

Please join us in welcoming our first AWS Security Heroes!

Chris Farris – Atlanta, USA

Security Hero Chris Farris has worked in IT since 1994, primarily focused on Linux, networking, and security. For the past eight years, he has been deeply involved in public cloud and public cloud security in media and entertainment, leveraging his expertise to build and evolve cloud security programs at Turner Broadcasting, WarnerMedia, Discovery Communications, and PlayOn! Sports. His current focus is on educating and empowering builders to understand core cloud security concepts, and to enable small and medium sized organizations to better secure and govern in the cloud.

Gerardo Castro – Callao, Perú

Security Hero Gerardo Castro is a Security Solutions Architect at Caleidos. He likes to write technical posts and talk about cybersecurity on his Medium blog. He also builds and leads videos, podcasts, online classes, and workshops focused on AWS. In addition, Gerardo is a community leader of the AWS UG Security Community in Latin America, and has inspired many people to begin and grow their career in the cloud.

Keisuke Usuda – Chiba, Japan

Security Hero Keisuke Usuda is a Senior Solution Architect at Classmethod and holds the CISSP certification. He is also a core member of the Japan AWS User Group focused on security (Security-JAWS), and regularly organizes events. Keisuke has a deep affection for AWS security-related managed services, and advocates for the enablement of Amazon GuardDuty across all AWS accounts worldwide.

Ray Lin (Chia-Wei Lin) – Taipei, Taiwan

Security Hero Ray Lin is an AWS and Security Consultant at iFUS System Consultants Ltd., and excels in building teams and developing new products from zero to one. His primary expertise spans software project management, Agile development, business and system analysis, SaaS product development, architecture design, cybersecurity, DevSecOps, and AI. Ray has also made significant contributions to the AWS community, particularly in cybersecurity and secure architecture design. His commitment to sharing knowledge is evident in his active involvement in the AWS User Group Taiwan.

Shun Yoshie – Yokohama, Japan

Security Hero Shun Yoshie is a Security Consultant at Nomura Research Institute, Ltd(NRI), and has been a Hero since 2021. He consults on operational design of security in multi-cloud environments, and has been focusing on themes related to multi-cloud, Cloud Native, CNAPP, and Security Observability. Additionally, Shun joined the Japanese AWS User Group (JAWS-UG) in 2013, and he has been running the JAWS-UG Tokyo chapter since 2019.

Teri Radichel – Savannah, USA

Security Hero Teri Radichel is the CEO of 2nd Sight Lab, a cybersecurity company that offers three services: cloud security training to organizations, penetration tests, and security assessments. She also answers cybersecurity questions for clients on consulting calls scheduled through IANS Research. Teri is the author of the book, “Cybersecurity for Executives in the Age of Cloud,” has been a Hero since 2016, and received the SANS 2017 Difference Makers Award for security innovation. Teri has 13 cybersecurity and pentesting certifications, including the GSE, which required a two-day hands-on in person test to pass at the time she obtained it.

Learn More

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

— Taylor

Announcing the latest AWS Heroes – June 2023

Post Syndicated from Taylor Jacobsen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-the-latest-aws-heroes-june-2023/

AWS Heroes dedicate their time to help others build better and faster on AWS. Heroes support and give back to the community in a variety of ways: contributing to open source projects, organizing AWS Community Days, speaking at conferences, leading workshops, mentoring builders, hosting meetups, and much more.

Please welcome and say hello to our newest AWS Heroes!

AJ Stuyvenberg – Boston, USA

Serverless Hero AJ Stuyvenberg is a Staff Engineer at Datadog, and has been a member of the serverless community since early 2017. His work focuses on serverless and distributed system observability. AJ is an open source author and maintains several projects, which improve the serverless developer experience. He has also spoken at multiple conferences, including AWS re:Invent and AWS Summits, and frequently writes about serverless topics on his blog.

Danielle Heberling – Hillsboro, USA

Serverless Hero Danielle Heberling is a software engineer with a background that includes being a musician, teaching at a K-8 public school, and working in technical support. She’s passionate about building things that make the world a better place, whether that be through social change or a good laugh. When she’s not coding or talking about serverless, you can often find her reaching back to her teaching roots by mentoring folks from underrepresented groups that would like to make a career switch into tech.

Dominik Grzywaczewski – Lublin, Poland

Community Hero Dominik Grzywaczewski is a Senior Cloud Site Reliability Engineer at Chaos Gears with more than 15 years of experience in IT. His primary objective is to assist companies in gaining a deeper understanding of Cloud Computing technologies, and effectively leveraging them to drive faster and more secure innovation. Dominik shares his passion by organizing technical meetups and workshops, and consistently collaborates with AWS community members. He also founded the AWS User Group in Lublin (Poland) and co-organizes the AWS Community Day conference in Warsaw (Poland).

Johannes Koch – Hessen, Germany

DevTools Hero Johannes Koch is a Sr. DevOps Engineer, Developer Experience, GTS at FICO where he contributes to the FICO®️ Platform. He shares his best practices related to Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) on his YouTube channel: cicdonaws. Johannes also founded the AWS User Group Bergstrasse, helped to start the AWS Community DACH Förderverein, and is part of the team that organizes the AWS Community Day in the DACH region.

Michael Walmsley – Melbourne, Australia

Serverless Hero Michael Walmsley is a Lead Technology Architect in the myWizard®️ Automation Group at Accenture, where he is focused on building event-driven products in the cloud. He is excited by the AWS Lambda Powertools open-source projects, and has been using and actively contributing to them since 2020. Michael is also a passionate AWS community member in Australia, supporting local meetups and conferences. He helps organize and run the AWS Programming and Tools Meetup in Melbourne, which focuses on running monthly hands-on training workshops that are open to everyone.

Mikey Fan – Beijing, China

Community Hero Mikey Fan is a Cloud-native Application Architect and SDN Developer. Since 2020, he has been actively exploring how to build innovative applications based on AWS EKS, Private 5G, and SD-WAN technology, and then applying them to 5G Edge Computing scenarios. Mikey is also a cloud-computing technology evangelist and an open-source enthusiast. He enjoys contributing code to open-source projects, such as Kubernetes and Tungsten Fabric, and he likes to demo how these open-source technologies can be combined with AWS cloud computing to create greater value.

Ran Isenberg – Kfar Saba, Israel

Serverless Hero Ran Isenberg is a principal software architect at CyberArk, where he designs and builds serverless services. He is passionate about CI/CD and AWS CDK, and has contributed several utilities to the AWS Lambda Powertools open-source project. Ran also maintains numerous serverless related open-source projects on his GitHub account, such as the AWS Lambda cookbook – a serverless service template that gets you started in the serverless world with all of the best practices in seconds.

Sabiha Ali – Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Community Hero Sabiha Ali is a Solutions Architect at ScaleCapacity. She specializes in Amazon Connect, architecting resilient and secure systems in the cloud. As an Amazon Connect Ambassador, she helps businesses enhance their customer experiences. Her unwavering passion for learning has earned her numerous AWS certifications (9X), solidifying her expertise in the field. She became an AWS User Group Leader in Dubai after starting out as an active AWS Community Builder. Sabiha is also committed to empowering women in the tech industry, making her a valued professional and an advocate for change.

Tomasz Dudek – Wroclaw, Poland

Machine Learning Hero Tomasz Dudek works as a Data & AI Team Lead and a Solutions Architect at Chaos Gears. He guides customers on how leveraging machine learning powered solutions can help their businesses thrive. He also designs AWS architectures and manages a data-focused team. Additionally, Tomasz co-organizes the AWS Community Day Poland, and as well as hosts the AWS User Group in his hometown Wroclaw. He often conducts workshops, such as SageMaker Immersion Days, speaks at conferences, and shares his knowledge in the form of short posts on LinkedIn, and longer ones on his blog, ‘MLOps and how you tame it.’

Wojciech Dąbrowski – Katowice, Poland

Community Hero Wojciech Dąbrowski is Head of Cloud Architecture at DTiQ, where he leads the team responsible for the architecture of cloud solutions and the cloud adaptation strategy in the organization. He has been an AWS User Group Silesia leader since 2019, and has managed to organize multiple online and offline meetups. In addition, Wojciech leads workshops and presents cloud computing and software engineering topics at various events.

Learn More

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.

— Taylor

Meet the Newest AWS Heroes – March 2023

Post Syndicated from Taylor Jacobsen original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/meet-the-newest-aws-heroes-march-2023/

The AWS Heroes are passionate AWS experts who are dedicated to sharing their in-depth knowledge within the community. They inspire, uplift, and motivate the global AWS community, and today, we’re excited to announce and recognize the newest Heroes in 2023!

Aidan Steele – Melbourne, Australia

Serverless Hero Aidan Steele is a Senior Engineer at Nightvision. He is an avid AWS user, and has been using the first platform and EC2 since 2008. Fifteen years later, EC2 still has a special place in his heart, but his interests are in containers and serverless functions, and blurring the distinction between them wherever possible. He enjoys finding novel uses for AWS services, especially when they have a security or network focus. This is best demonstrated through his open source contributions on GitHub, where he shares interesting use cases via hands-on projects.

Ananda Dwi Rahmawati – Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Container Hero Ananda Dwi Rahmawati is a Sr. Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, specializing in system integration between cloud infrastructure, CI/CD workflows, and application modernization. She implements solutions using powerful services provided by AWS, such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), combined with open source tools to achieve the goal of creating reliable, highly available, and scalable systems. She is a regular technical speaker who delivers presentations using real-world case studies at several local community meetups and conferences, such as Kubernetes and OpenInfra Days Indonesia, AWS Community Day Indonesia, AWS Summit ASEAN, and many more.

Wendy Wong – Sydney, Australia

Data Hero Wendy Wong is a Business Performance Analyst at Service NSW, building data pipelines with AWS Analytics and agile projects in AI. As a teacher at heart, she enjoys sharing her passion as a Data Analytics Lead Instructor for General Assembly Sydney, writing technical blogs on dev.to. She is both an active speaker for AWS analytics and an advocate of diversity and inclusion, presenting at a number of events: AWS User Group Malaysia, Women Who Code, AWS Summit Australia 2022, AWS BuildHers, AWS Innovate Modern Applications, and many more.

Learn More

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.

— Taylor