Today on October 28, marks exactly 1 year since I got the email with the subject “Will you be our AWS Hero?”. My previous article about Becoming an AWS (Serverless) Hero quickly became and still is the most frequently read article of all my (currently more than 135) articles on dev.to so far which says something…
In this article, I’d like to review this year from my perspective. But as many AWS Heros also like to share their stories around how they received this notification what they did as the email dropped, and what was their reaction, I’d like to share my story as well. I’d like to start with the week prior to receiving this notification. I had vacation that week and spent it with my wife, younger son and the dog in the beautiful Saxon Switzerland (the region near Dresden, Germany). In the middle of this one-week vacation I went for 2 days by train to Berlin to the Serverless Architecture Conference to co-lead the workshop and give 2 talks there. On the day of 2 talks I also visited AWS User Group Berlin meetup and gave also a talk there in the evening before returning to Dresden. So, it has been 3 talks and 1 workshop within less than 36 hours for me (quite exhausting to be honest). During that stay I was asked by several other AWS enthusiasts when I’ll finally become an AWS Hero. It was more like a joke as they saw my passion for delivering talks all over Europe and writing articles (and this on top of my job and family stuff). But what could I answer them?! I did what I enjoyed most. But the truth is also that I was frequently confronted with this question in the last months.
When I returned home from my vacation and next day, it was Monday, October 28, I went to the office and it was very intense date as it always is after vacation: reading and answering emails, helping to solve urgent problems. It was a full-packed day, and as I was going back home by tram Elina Lesyk wrote me a message whether I’d like to finally join her 8 weeks program with the title “Building GPT from scratch”. I wanted also to learn more about LLMs, GenAI and saw that Elina (she is also from Ukraine and back then AWS employee) offers the course but I didn’t make it to the first cohort. I directly confirmed my participation (program had to start in the beginning of November) and I knew that end of the year 2025 will be very intense for me, as we have Christmas season at work and a lot to do. But I have never been and am scared about the fully packaged agendas, especially if I’m passionate about learning something. I then reached home, talked to my wife about this “new opportunity”, talked to the kids (it was their first day at school after vacation as well) during the supper together. On this day in the evening, I also had …another online talk … at the AWS Serverless Toronto meetup and because of the time difference the talk should have to start at 11 pm my time. So, I wanted to focus on the content and was going through my presentation slides (it was around 9pm) as I was hearing the sound on my mobile phone which indicated the arrival of the new email. Nothing special, as I have many of those daily, so I looked into it… and 1 second later I realized what was going on. It was “Will you be our AWS Hero?” email.
I carefully read email, stood up and asked my wife whether I was sleeping. She denied😊. Then I went to the garden to breathe the fresh air and came back and showed this email to my wife. She knew about the existence of this program and that this is kind of my dream to join it one day, but I have never bothered her with the details. Having been completely over the moon I then decided to complete all required steps to join the program, and my wife even took a fresh picture of me to be used in the AWS Hero’s profile.
Needless to say, that it was an unusual talk for me at the meetup later this night as I couldn’t focus myself at all. But I wasn’t allowed to share this info publicly. I didn’t have much sleep at night after and had a dream…that this all was only a dream😊. So, after I woke up next day, I searched for the notification email once again and re-read it. Nothing changed - I was still offered to be a Hero😊. Two days later, on Wednesday October 30, I went to Frankfurt to give a talk at the local AWS User Group and was once again asked this question about when I’ll become an AWS Hero. Maybe I smiled too much as I answered: “I don’t know”, as the official announcement was targeted on November 6.
I’ll skip the part with all warm congratulations on becoming a Hero (which I was very happy about) and a positive “stress” of booking the trip to Las Vegas to re:Invent 2025 on a very short notice trying to figure out how to explain it to my manager and (a bit) to my family which always supports me.
I even thought of postponing the “build ChatGPT from scratch” course because I was unsure whether I will be able to focus on it (for example trip to Las Vegas was planned to be in the middle of the course), but I sticked to it. I wasn’t very productive there to be honest, but it gave me a push to start digging even deeper into Gen and Agentic AI topics.
What many people asked me during the last year was: “What has changed since you become an AWS Hero?” I hope nothing substantially or as I used to answer: “My dog doesn’t care”. Yes, I visited re:Invent in Las Vegas for the first time last year and I will do it this year too. Yes, I participated in the AWS Heroes Summit in Seattle, which both have been tremendous experiences. But I still do basically the same as what I did before: I’m still quite active on social media, I write and publish articles (50+ in the last 12 months) and I give talks (25+ in the last 12 months) quite frequently. I now try to cover more and different AWS topics: besides the AWS Serverless (and Java) ones, I also write and talk about Agentic AI (Amazon Bedrock AgentCore service) with even examples in Python and Amazon Aurora DSQL database. I enjoy visiting new countries and giving my talks there. This year I gave talks in Switzerland, Hungary, Poland, Austria, Czech Republic, Netherlands and USA. The exceptional highlights were among others: speaking at AWS EMEA Summit in Hamburg, InfoQ Dev Summit Munich, Java User Group Vienna and Seattle and some very cool AWS User Groups and Community Days. I also spoke at various online meetups and conferences organized by the Ukrainian (Java and AWS) communities which is very important for me as the Ukrainian-native guy. I even did Re:Invent 2024 recap in Ukrainian language which we streamed live from the AWS office in Munich with some Ukrainian-native AWS employees based there. Maybe it has got easier for me to be accepted as a speaker when I’m an AWS Hero or even be proactively invited to speak at some cool event. I don’t really know, but I’ve been frequently approached (by email or in-person during the events) by the organizers of Java and AWS User Groups or AWS Community Days who invited me to speak at their next event (which I’m very humbled about). My focus is still on providing value with my presentations and articles by sharing my knowledge. I still get a lot of rejections, which is a totally normal thing. Otherwise, I won’t manage it anyways. What has really changed for me is that now I’ve got an opportunity to talk to AWS service teams (more) frequently and directly than before, learn from them, ask questions and even sometimes provide them feedback. I also appreciate all the networking and conversations during the events I participate in.
My biggest highlight of this year though is still to come on December 2: I’ll be speaking at the re:Invent for the first time. See my and Viktor Vedmich’s session Build modern applications with Amazon Aurora DSQL.
I’m really looking forward to it!
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