Every year I try to set myself a simple goal: build things that are useful, write about what I learn, and show up for the community.
This year, I've set a metric: at least 12 meetups as AWS user group leader or member. I've failed it, but that goal turned into something much bigger.
🏃 TL;DR
I tried to measure a year with numbers.
This is a story about setting goals, missing some of them, and accidentally building something much bigger in the process. It’s about communities that start from zero chairs and end up full of conversations, about writing that turns into thinking, and thinking that only works because someone on the other side is paying attention.
No grand finale. This is my last article of the year: the only one without code, diagrams, or architectures, but maybe one that mattered most to me.
🔗 Starting from the ground up: AWS User Groups
One of the most meaningful challenges this year was founding a new AWS User Group in Cuneo.
Starting a UG from scratch is very different from joining an established one. There’s no audience, no routine, no guarantees. You need to convince people that showing up is worth their time, that there is value in sharing experiences even when things are still rough around the edges.
Everything has felt easier thanks to Leonardo Viada and Gioele Blanc as partners in crime, but also because people have responded with genuine energy and curiosity.
A special thanks goes to Alessandro Ponzo, who acted as our sponsor and mentor, supporting every meetup: not only through his talks, but by actively guiding and nurturing the community.
Seeing the first meetup come to life, with real conversations, real questions, and real enthusiasm, made all the effort worth it. It confirmed something I strongly believe in: strong communities don’t start with stages or sponsors, they start with trust and curiosity.
In parallel, AWS User Group Pavia kept being a good playground for experimentation. We started in 2024 and this year we pushed things further with 5 meetups and a developer challenge, getting hands-on with Amazon Q Developer, with the huge help of Catalin Borsan and Francesco Bertani, and turning learning into something tangible and fun. Watching people build, compete, and collaborate reminded me why UG formats work so well when they are practical and inclusive.
We also experimented with new formats, such as the “re:Cap AWS Milan Summit 2025”, conceived as a counterpoint to the traditional “re:Cap re:Invent”. In this format, we explored the key announcements and most relevant moments from Italy’s main AWS-focused event, following the same approach traditionally used in December for AWS’s most important global conference.
Here, organizing and experimenting felt effortless thanks to the community superheroes from Pavia and beSharp: Luca Ballista, Damiano Giorgi and Antonio Callegari.
AWS User Groups were the constant thread throughout the year: not just events, but places where ideas are tested before becoming blog posts, talks, or projects.
🇮🇹 From local to national: being part of the Italian community’s voice and Community Days
I'll start from this: I had the honor of representing AWS User Group Pavia during the live streaming of the re:Invent CEO Keynote for the AWS UG Italy community.
Being invited was already meaningful.
Meeting such expert people from other cities and AWS User Groups made it even better.
Those conversations made one thing clear: there’s a lot of energy moving inside the Italian AWS community, and many shared ideas that could turn into great collaborations in 2026. Let’s just say some of them might involve familiar faces, we’ll see what happens Andrea Saltarello.
The same energy was clear to me when Italian AWS community deliver a strong, unified response to Michal Salanci 's exciting initiative, AWS Community pre:Invent Warmup, giving participants the chance to win a trip to re:Invent in Las Vegas.
I personally took the opportunity to amplify the message, helping as many Italian UG as possible get involved as it was a wonderful opportunity for Italian UG members to win a very big prize (going to Vegas)!
In Italy, August is sacred: everyone disappears on vacation, so I was definitely not expecting much engagement. Instead, the response was immediate: posts across Italian AWS User Groups, emails through Meetup, and genuine enthusiasm to share this opportunity with everyone. Italy became the national community with the largest representation among AWS UG partners in this initiative!
I’d like to give a big shout-out and heartfelt thanks to the to AWS UG leaders across cities Simone Merlini, Luca Ballista, Guido Maria Nebiolo, Leonardo Viada, Immacolata Smelzo and Monica Colangelo whose energy made this possible.
And finally this energy scaled up beautifully at the AWS Community Day Italy: I've been here only to partecipate, just as a member of the community and not as an organizer.
At this point, it feels to me less like an event and more like a reunion of experts and friends, all coming from AWS initiatives and AWS User Groups. You don’t need external validation anymore, the room itself is proof of how much skill, passion, and experimentation is happening in the Italian cloud community.
One message that really stuck with me was shared by Renato Losio and it should probably be an aspiration for anyone working in tech.
🚀 AWS Community Builders: the multiplier effect
Yet this year, something truly special happened.
I officially joined the AWS Community Builders program, in the Serverless category.
And suddenly I feel more responsibility to give back.
Being part of this program didn’t change what I do day to day. I was already writing, building, and playing with real-world use cases. What changed was the amplification opportunity. supported from people like Jason Dunn.
This program became the foundation that amplified everything else I've made this year: articles, talks, experiments, and community work.
You also get rewarded for good content, as happened to me after joining the program and giving me the opportunity to get some cool swag products.
✍️ When writing starts to echo back
I have always written my articles in English because I consider it the ideal language to integrate seamlessly with the code being explained, and because I believe that impact scales when knowledge crosses borders. This year, amplified by AWS Community Builders community, that choice paid off in unexpected ways.
Seeing my articles cited in international newsletters felt surreal at first.
Being featured multiple times by Allen Helton in Ready, Set, Cloud, by Lee Gilmore in multiple issues of Serverless Advocate, including being selected as a Serverless expert, and by Jones Zachariah Noel N in Serverless Terminal, was a huge honor.
Not because of visibility, but because my work appeared cited and next to people I’ve been learning from for years, who were also genuinely open, approachable, and generous with their time and feedback.
One of my technical articles was also cited in the Spanish newsletter of Marcia Villalba: desplegando.cloud. Something I honestly didn’t see coming. Being referenced in English newsletters or Italian communities already feels meaningful, but seeing my work cited in another language adds an entirely different perspective.
At some point, even companies shaping the AI space started referencing my projects. Seeing work around agent memory highlighted by teams like Mem0.
If you’ve ever been part of a real community, you know that
what you give is never comparable to what you get back.
This year, I can assure you, what I’ve received in return far exceeds what I’ve given.
I have also started published content in Italian, including a recent article on Tom’s Hardware . I believe that contributing in my native language is equally important, as it allows me to give back to my local community and make knowledge more accessible.
🧠 From writing to thinking
I’ve come to realize that this feedback loop exists only because I started writing differently.
At some point, I stopped treating blog posts as explanations and started using them as a way to reason about systems and architectures. Each article became a place to slow down, question my own assumptions, and test whether an idea could survive contact with reality, with experts and could be shipped to production.
I've worked hard on Strands Agents SDK series which turn from a simple quick start into a deeper exploration of how agents behave in real environments: adding memory in serverless setups, managing context in stateless architectures, introducing guardrails and designing an agent that don’t collapse outside a demo.
MCP series followed the same philosophy. Instead of amplifying hype around MCP, I focused on making it deployable and understandable: minimal MCP servers in serverless on AWS Lambda, different IaC frameworks using Serverless Framework, CDK, and SAM, and eventually a small CLI to help choose the right approach based on actual constraints.
I wrote also a mini RAG on AWS series, starting from a solid way to do it with Pinecone to an experimental one with Amazon S3 Vectors which could be anyway shipped to production to reduce costs.
The common goal was clarity. Turning abstract concepts into something you can deploy, break, observe, and improve.
That’s where writing stopped being just teaching or showing off something, and became a tool to think better about architecture and to share that thinking with people who were walking the same path (and give me real feedback).
🎤 Conferences as convergence points
For the same reason, conferences this year were not just places to listen to empty stories, but spaces where I can find ideas to test, challenge, and ground in reality.
Go Serverless was probably the clearest expression of this. An event organized together with the Eleva team, it became a stage for real production stories, where teams talked openly about trade-offs, constraints, and decisions. No polished marketing narratives, just architectures that exist because they solve real business problems. After three editions, our takeaway is simple: serverless is no longer experimental. It’s a deliberate, strategic choice.
ServerlessDays Milan played a different but equally important role. Joining as a speaker, I experienced firsthand how these events sit in a unique space between conferences and meetups.
They’re where patterns meet people, and where conversations start immediately after the last slide.
Topics discussed online suddenly had faces, voices, and follow-up debates. People you read, quote, or learn from turn into peers you can challenge, agree with, or build alongside. That continuity is what turns isolated content into an ecosystem, and a real community.
The AWS Summit in Milan tied everything together. Not as a single highlight, but as a confirmation. Seeing the Italian community show up, participate in Game Day challenges powered by Amazon Q Developer, and actively occupy the community spaces was a reminder of how much energy there is when builders are given room to connect. Spending the day with the Eleva team made it even clearer that community is not something parallel to work. It’s part of how good work happens.
Across all these events, the pattern stayed the same: ideas move faster when people meet, and your work get better when stories are shared where they can be questioned, reused, and improved.
🛠️ GenAI workshops: real needs avoiding the hype
An important part of the year was running GenAI workshops for AWS. I ran quite a few of them this year (at least 10), including one hosted at the AWS office in Milan, with 25 seats filled by people coming from different companies.
I've worked on concrete use cases, real business processes, and scenarios where GenAI can deliver tangible and immediate value. Only after understanding why, we move to the how: models, architectures, Amazon Bedrock, security, and data governance.
The goal was never to sell, it was to understand where GenAI truly makes sense, and how Eleva and AWS can help organizations adopt it responsibly.
Because in the end, technology is a tool, not the goal.
It exists to solve real problems, not to create hype.
📚 Continuous Learning: helping shaping new certifications
Another highlight of 2025 was being invited by Pamela Brown as from AWS to join the beta program shaping the future of hands-on AWS certifications, focused on serverless and agentic AI. Since I hadn’t planned to pursue any certifications this year, it came as a great surprise and an amazing opportunity to challenge myself.
These new microcredentials aren’t about memorizing services. They’re about applying knowledge: solving real scenarios, building, debugging, and finding working solutions.
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Being part of the beta wasn’t just about taking exams; it was about contributing feedback to how future builders will learn. The self-paced exam labs were a great refresher, but also a strong reminder that hands-on first is what truly makes skills stick perfectly aligned with the shift I’ve made this year in my articles and writing, focusing on practical, applicable knowledge rather than just theory.
🔺 A special note on Eleva
None of this would have been possible without Eleva.
Not just as a company, but as an environment that genuinely supported this journey day after day. Eleva gave me the space, trust, and encouragement to grow, explore ideas, and invest time in communities, writing, and learning, knowing I was never doing it alone.
What truly made the difference are the people.
Luca, Claudia, Salvatore, Adriana and Lorenzo your constant support, openness, and belief in my growth shaped much of what I was able to achieve this year. Having people who care, who listen, and who actively invest in your development changes everything.
I also want to take a moment to recognize the developers on my team. Much of their work happens quietly, out of sight, but it’s the solid ground that supports every opportunity described here. This year, in agreement with Lorenzo, I took on the role of Head of Software Engineering, which brought new challenges to my table: guiding others in their technical and professional growth has been both a joy and an honor. I hope I have done a good job for devs in Eleva, fully aware that I can always improve, and determined to give my best in this new role.
Growth doesn’t happen without the right people around you: thank you for making this year possible.
🔄 Closing the loop
Looking back at 2025, I didn’t reach the number of meetups I had in mind.
What I have done instead was something harder to measure, but far more meaningful.
Over the year, through AWS user groups, articles, workshops, conferences, and long conversations, relationships slowly took shape. Ideas evolved because people engaged with them. Writing changed because others reacted, questioned, and shared their perspectives.
This year reminded me that growth in tech, and beyond, doesn’t come from isolated effort. It comes from people thinking together, learning together, and trusting the process together.
As 2025 comes to a close, the lesson I carry forward is: keep building with intention, keep writing to understand better, and keep nurturing the communities that make all of this possible.
That’s how the year closes and there could be no better way to begin a new one.
🙋 Who am I
I'm D. De Sio and I work as a Head of Software Engineering in Eleva.
I'm currently (Apr 2025) an AWS Certified Solution Architect Professional and AWS Certified DevOps Engineer Professional, but also a User Group Leader (in Pavia), an AWS Community Builder and, last but not least, a #serverless enthusiast.
My work in this field is to advocate about serverless and help as more dev teams to adopt it, as well as customers break their monolith into API and micro-services using it.
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