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 Heroes also like to share their stories around how they received this notification, what they did when the email dropped, and what their reaction was, I’d like to share mine as well. I’d like to start with the week prior to receiving this notification. I had a 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 the 2 talks, I also visited the AWS User Group Berlin meetup and gave 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 would 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 few months.
When I returned home from my vacation and the next day, it was Monday, October 28, I went to the office, and it was a very intense day 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 asking whether I’d like to finally join her 8-week program with the title “Building GPT from scratch”. I also wanted to learn more about LLMs and GenAI, and saw that Elina (she is also from Ukraine and was an AWS employee back then) offers the course, but I didn’t make it to the first cohort. I directly confirmed my participation (the program had to start at the beginning of November), and I knew that the end of the year 2025 would be very intense for me, as we have the Christmas season at work and a lot to do. But I have never been and am scared of the fully packaged agendas, especially if I’m passionate about learning something. I then reached home, talked to my wife about this “new opportunity”, and talked to the kids (it was their first day at school after vacation as well) during 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 had 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 9 pm) as I was hearing the sound on my mobile phone, which indicated the arrival of a 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 the “Will you be our AWS Hero?” email.
I carefully read the 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, it was an unusual talk for me at the meetup later that night as I couldn’t focus 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 the 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 for 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 very short notice, trying to figure out how to explain it to my manager and (a bit) to my family.
I even thought of postponing the “build ChatGPT from scratch” course because I was unsure whether I would be able to focus on it (for example trip to Las Vegas was planned to be in the middle of the course), but I stuck 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 became 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 has been a tremendous experience. But I still do basically the same as 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, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, and the 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 a Ukrainian-native guy. I even did a re:Invent 2024 recap in the Ukrainian language, which we streamed live from the AWS office in Munich with some Ukrainian-native AWS employees based there. Maybe it has gotten 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 anyway. 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!
Top comments (1)
Thanks for sharing! I love the detailed breakdown of how all this was happening.
And the fact that rejections from events help you to manage to deliver the accepted talks 😉🙃