DEV Community: Andrew Brown 🇨🇦

Post-Hackathon Advice: Turning Lemons 🍋 into Lemonade 🍹

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 21:50:10 +0000

So I didn't win the most recent Hackathon I entered, but you know that doesn't matter, because I have never won a Hackathon (and probably never will).

But every Hackathon project I've built, I've turned into something more valuable.

So here's my Cruddur app

And I've turned it into a 12 week bootcamp. lol

This was my first Hackathon circa 2009?

I didn't win, but I did however flip this into getting multiple clients building tech coaching sites...

How is your post-hackathon project doing? 💭

Cruddur - The not so great twitter clone using Ruby Sinatra + React + GCP CloudRun + MongoDB Atlas + Terraform

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 18:39:53 +0000

Hackathon Entry

Hey is Andrew Brown 👋 and I entering the MongoDB Atlas hackathon!

Will I win? I doubt it
have I learned something new? Quite a bit

The repo exists here. I built everything as I went:
https://github.com/omenking/mongodb-atlas-gcp-microblog

I did attempt to provide step-by-step tutorial instructions in the /docs directory, but it got a bit squirrelly near the end.

What does the app do?

Not a whole alot.

You can:

Write a microblog post that will show up on main feed
View a home feed
View a feed of a specific user's microblog
Search microblogs using the search (but only through the API not the UI lol)

You can't:

Login or Signup
Use mentions or hashtags
Reshare with comment
Reply
Followerships

So in terms of useful app, its not that great... 😂

I was more interested in the cloud infrastructure and showing folks how to solve deploying an app to GCP Cloud Run with a MongoDB Atlas backed database.

What was the tech stack?

Sinatra for the backend
React for the frontend
Mongo Ruby River to interface with MongoDB
MongoDB Atlas because of course..
Google Cloud Platform to host the app
Terraform for Infrastructure as Code

I did all the development using Gitpod.

Time and Effort

I built this application over seven non-consecutive days.

My team (ExamPro) helped me out in a few areas:

solving React syntax
debugging networking issues on GCP
debugging CORS issues
debugging container env var issues
evaluating the mongodb driver
figuring on MongoDB Altas search (its not fully documented for ruby yet)
Navigating MongoDB Altas UI for specific access controls.

If I had to breakdown time spent it would look something like this:

hours	tasks
4	Building the Sinatra app
6	Building the react app
2	Figuring our docker containerization
1	Pushing containers to Artifact Registry
2	Deploying containers to Cloud Run via Terraform
5	Troubleshooting and configuring CORS
6	Troubleshooting Custom Domain with Google-managed certificate
5	Troubleshooting Connectivity to the container through GCP Load Balancer (Classic)
9	Troubleshooting Terraform GCP Load Balancer Module
1	Writing MongoDB integration
41	Total Hours

Why did you use Ruby and Sinatra?

I love ruby, full stop.

I chose Sinatra because I wanted a very simple framework so I can share this project with beginners.

A more complex framework like Grape or Rails has a-lot of magic going and so a beginner might not have confidence of what is actually happening.

A lightweight framework I think is more suited for the future technical path of containerized applications which has micro-services and event driven architecture (EDA) in mind.

Why did you choose React as the frontend framework?

I absolutely hate React. I would have much preferred to usemithril.js or maybe Vue, but I thought I should use a popular framework.

Next.js did cross my mind, but there is considerable opinion in that framework.

So the React implementation I used:

functional components (because classes scares some folks)
plain js (since Typescript scares some folks)
No Redux (since I don't want a headache)
create-react-app because it made setting up the boilerplate code fast
React Router v6 because I assume this the most popular.

Why did you choose GCP and GCP Cloud Run?

I am a Google Cloud Champion Innovator for the Modern Architecture category so it a was great opportunity to create some modern application content.

For compute it could have been App Engine, or Cloud Functions or Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) but the reason I choose Cloud Run was because it has built in CI/CD.

I never did use Cloud Run's CI/CD functionality in this project, since the time ran out troubleshooting various issues which will discuss.

Why did you choose Terraform?

Well I did use the Google Cloud CLI (gcloud) to provision repositories in the Artifact Registry, and did Click Ops in the console for managing the domain name in Cloud DNS.

For everything else I used Terraform. GCP has its own IaC called Cloud Deployment Manager which has its own template language via YAML files but as far as I know, nobody likes using it, and GCP supports Terraform more than their own tool in their documentation.

With AWS I normally use CloudFormation
With Azure I normally use Azure Bicep

But yeah, GCP just go with Terraform.

Why did you use Gitpod for your developer environment?

Gitpod is a Cloud Developer Environment (CDE), which is basically VSCode in your browser.

Using CDE made it really easy for my team members to jump in and help me places. All they had to do was press a button, and the could get to work.

There are other options out there like AWS Cloud9, Github Codespaces, but these options utilized a Virtual Machine (VM) as the attached environment.

Gitpod uses docker (which is managed by K8s) so its much faster to launch an environment, you don't have to "rebuild" an environment, its easy to discard a state back to a clean working version in case you jank the environment.

I'm also Gitpod Community Hero (because I really like Gitpod).

Why use MongoDB Ruby Driver instead of Mongoid?

Mongoid is a The Official Ruby Object Mapper for MongoDB. Its been around for a long time and makes it really easy working with MongoDB.

We didn't use it, because I know using DynamoDB's gem Dynamoid that these libraries while convenient get in the way of using advanced features or obscures fine-tuning of queries.

Alex Debrie is his DynamoDB Book strongly advises against using any kind of ORM or ObjectMapper for DynamoDB and the same here applies to MongoDB.

I've known out ORMs get in the way even when using Postgres, outing to just write simple Plain Ruby Objects along with raw SQL.

Since we wanted to use MongoDB Atlas Search and were thinking about using Change Streams, Mongoid wasn't going to support these.

Using the MongoDB Ruby Driver is quite straight forward.

Installing GCloud

GCloud is very well built CLI. Installing it is headache lol mostly due to how the docs are written.

Other providers you can just copy a block a text and go, but GCP, you have to walk through all the instructions and pick out your scenario.

To make life easier this is all the step you generally need for Ubuntu/Debian.

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates gnupg -y
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/cloud.google.gpg] https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt cloud-sdk main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-cloud-sdk.list
curl https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo apt-key --keyring /usr/share/keyrings/cloud.google.gpg add -
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install google-cloud-cli -y

GCloud also takes longer to install then other Cloud CLIs, and so I could not create a gitpod.yml file to just install it in my environment on launch because the long install time would cause a timeout.

So I spent multiple times installing it, again and again on fresh environments.

Commands I ended up memorizing since I ran them so many times were:

Logging into google cloud

gcloud init

gcloud auth application-default login

Authenticating to push to container images to Artifact Registry

gcloud auth configure-docker <region>-docker.pkg.dev

Pushing to GCP Artifact Registry

On other providers like AWS and Azure they give you one click copy and paste instructions to push to their respected managed container repository services.

Not GCP lol. You have to figure out their docs, and its not a simple copy and paste.

First you need authenicate so you can push to Artifact Registry:

gcloud auth configure-docker us-east1-docker.pkg.dev

Then you need to tag your build image with the artifact registry repo address:

docker tag cruddur-app us-east1-docker.pkg.dev/cruddur/backend-sinatra/backend-sinatra:latest

Then you push

docker push us-east1-docker.pkg.dev/cruddur/backend-sinatra/backend-sinatra:latest

Renaming Build Image for Docker Compose

Instead of building images indivually I would build them via docker compose:

docker compose build

However, docker compose will use your folder name (basically your project repo name) as the prepended name.

My repo name is mongodb-atlas-gcp-microblog and a container name in the docker-compose.yml file is frontend-react so I'd end up in an image name:

mongodb-atlas-gcp-microblog-frontend-react

which is really long. So if you use the -p flag you can override the prepend name

So the following:

docker compose -p cruddur build

Will then produce this as container image name:

cruddur-frontend-react

Google Cloud Run Port requirements

So I (re)discovered that Cloud Run expects your container to listen on port 8080.

So in the Dockerfile I had to figure out how to pass along Environment Variables to this file

FROM ruby:3.1.0

# sets the default port (it can still be overriden)
ENV PORT=4567

ADD . /app
WORKDIR /app
RUN bundle install
EXPOSE ${PORT}
CMD [ "sh", "-c", "bundle exec rackup --host 0.0.0.0 -p $PORT"]

We could achieve that wi the ${PORT}.

Notice I set ENV instead of ARG, ARG only works for the build, and I wanted this Environment Variable to persist when the container was running.

Also I had to add CMD [ "sh", "-c", otherwise the environment variable would have not been interpreted in the CMD command. It would just show up blank.

Notice I am doing this:

"bundle exec rackup --host 0.0.0.0 -p $PORT"

And not this:

"bundle exec rackup --host 0.0.0.0 -p ${PORT}"

The former is just me reading the env var from the environment where the latter is actual interpolation in the template.

CORS, CORS, CORS!

Once I attempted to have the frontend and backend talking to each other I ran into CORS, as always.

So I installed sintra-cors. There were a few different cors gems to choose from but this one was dead simple.

Wildcarding on part of the domain eg. .gitpod.io was not working, so I had to pass the full domains for both services to resolve cors.

So when you deploy to Google Cloud Run they generate a endpoint URL so you can access the site.

I thought I could get this endpoint url via an environment variables that might get set by default by Cloud Run so that I could whitelist these endpoints for CORS.

This is not the case. I thought maybe there could been some very convoluted way using the Google SDK to try and get the endpoint URL dynamically but, there was a race case of collecting all the needed endpoints at different start times.

Again, I could not wildcard on part of the domain, but honestly thats a bad practice since I don't need all of Google Cloud Run endpoints urls allow to bypass CORS.

So That meant I would need a custom domain, and so we'd need a GCP Load Balancer.

Custom Domain with Load Balancer

So I already had my domain registered on Amazon Route53.

Google Cloud can generate an SSL for you with Google-Managed SSL. While I attempted to point an A record to the GCP Load Balancer while the hosted zone was managed by Amazon Route53, the SSL certificate was failing to provision.

I don't know if this solved it, but I updated the domain name servers to google and then use Cloud DNS to use the A Record to point the GCP Load Balancer and this worked to generate an SSL certificate for Google-Managed SSL Certificates.

I found that it took 30 minutes for the SSL Certificate to generate, but you have to remember to point the A record to the load balancer or it will say it failed. You don't need to restart the certificate process, it would figure it out after a few minutes.

Provisioning the GCP Load Balancer with Terraform

There is a GCP Terraform module for setting up a load balancer and all of its components.

There are examples on the Terraform Registry website, and there were different versions so I had to find an example with 5.1 version for multi-backend with pathing.

I don't know if this is module managed by Terraform or GCP but it could use more documentation, but I could figure things out for the most part by just looking at various examples.

I forgot this option when piecing different examples together:

  create_url_map    = false

And so this caused there to be two load balancer, once pointing to just my API and another with both my backends with no frontends.

Phantom CORS issues

I thought I had the CORS issues behind me, but they started happening again.

We eventually discovered that the MONGO_ATLAS_URL environment variable was not being set. Why this through a CORS issues, I don't know, but once we ensure the env var was being set and passed to the container no more CORS issues.

MongoDB Local Development Skipped

I was thinking of using in my docker-compose.yml a local container of MongoDB before using MongoDB Atlas directly.

However I realized we would have to use a direct connection to a MongoDB Atlas database because (as far as I know) there is no local container that runs these more exotic features of MongoDB Atlas such as search.

MongoDB Atlas UI

It was straight forward.

I did have to hunt down in the UI, Database Access to reset the database user password.

For Network Access, I wasn't sure if I had to whitelist the GCP Load Balancer, like, would the Cloud Run containers IP address be the GCP Load Balancer IP address, so instead I just said, Allow Access from Anywhere.

MongoDB Atlas Search

Before you can create an index for search you need to populate data in your database.

To setup the index I just click straight though all the configuration options.

The documentation for MongoDB Atlas Search for Ruby was incomplete (according Bayko my co-founder) so he had to I guess look at the API Specification or dig through the MongoDB Driver.

He had to use $search option along with the aggregate option:

      def search_document collection, document
        attrs = [{
          '$search': {
            'index': 'default',
            'text': {
              'query': document,
              'path': 'message'
            }
          }
        },{ 
          '$limit': 10 
        }]
        result = []
        collection.aggregate(attrs).each do |document|
          result.push document
        end
        return result
      end

Data Modelling for MongoDB

Uhh... We didn't have to do anything special?

With DynamoDB even for the simplest of tables I have to plan GSI, LSI, the partition key and sort key.

With MongoDB we just dump data in, and it worked. No thought or plan involved.

Maybe if we had replies, followerships, shares, things like that then Data Modeling would have been something we would have had to consider more.

GCP Load Balancer "Classic"

Using the GCP Terraform Module deploys the Classic version of the GCP Load Balancer. I couldn't figure out the difference between Classic and current LB.

I don't think I want to be using Classic but I didn't want to spend the time setting up all the individual resources in the terraform file.

Classic in AWS for Load Balancers is something not recommend for use anymore
Classic in Azure for Load Balancers is just an lighter alternate to Azure Front Door

In GCP I don't know, but GCP does like to sunset their products, so I don't really want to be on Classic lol.

Conclusion

The easiest part of this entire project was MongoDB Altas and the MongoDB API.

So much time was taken up just deploying and troubleshooting multiple containers and the Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) cloud infrastructure.

But honestly thats the story for any CSPs, whether it's AWS, Azure or GCP.

GCP Cloud Run by far is the easiest serverless container offering from a 1st tier CSP.

GCP is really great, their docs just need a bit of work, and their Terraform modules needs a bit of love.

MongoDB gets DX great as always.

You're running an online conference but get called out for having an all-male speaker lineup 2 days prior. Yo, What do you do?

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Sun, 04 Dec 2022 17:31:18 +0000

We just wanted to get folks into serverless...

Imagine you are are a small-time startup trying to build a serverless framework along with a serverless platform.

Maybe after reading Andrew's Brown think piece "Serverless is ready, but users are not" you decide to get more folks into serverless by hosting an online conference around emerging serverless SaaS offerings.

You register a funny domain around a headline like "Is Serverless Ready?" and many LOLs ensue.

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1598033946914062336-301'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1598033946914062336&theme=dark" }

So you reach into your own personal network, and assemble a speaker list from other small-time SaaS offerings along with some community members.

As the online conference approaches, you repromote the event and oh no....

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1598132429201416192-297'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1598132429201416192&theme=dark" }

Your conference is getting called out by notable Women in Serverless for having an all-male lineup.

The conference is in a couple of days.

Yo, what do we do?

After some googling you come across Andrew Brown's suggested guide titled "You're running an online conference but get called out for having an all-male speaker lineup 2 days prior. Yo, What do you do?" and proceed to read these 6 Suggestions.

Suggestion 1: Accept, Acknowledge and Apologize

Firstly, you accept that you made a mistake during the execution of your conference. This is an internal dialog you need to say to yourself. Put any internal excuses aside eg. "We're just a small company with a small budget" and simply accept it.

Once you've accepted where you are now, the next thing to acknowledge are the shortcomings directly which could be something like this:

We booked an all-male speaker lineup
We failed to have a open CFP
We failed to have mechanisms in-place to uplift a more diverse speaker list
We rushed into an online conference
We failed to build and maintain a diverse network

Now with acceptance and acknowledge out of the way we can deliver a strong apology. The purpose of an apology is to lay up a community promise which will be the start of our course correction. Just please, don't put any excuses in the apology.

Suggestion 2: Cancel the Conference

I crunched the numbers and sorry buddies but I think the best route is to cancel the conference.

Even if you do suggestion 1, if you proceed with the conference with no corrections it will undo all your efforts of suggestion 1.

If you throw in a few diverse folks into the lineup last minute (which right now would be super awkward for anyone to accept), its not going to do shit for you because it just shows how poorly planned the conference was.

Just cancel, its an online conference LOL. Its not like you have paid sponsors, or physical costs.

I say "cancel" instead of "reschedule" because lets signify we are doing a "hard refresh". Let's plan for Serverless Conference 2.0 and there are other things you need to do first before you even think about doing a conference.

Suggestion 3: Build Your Diverse Network

First ask yourself, Why did you end up with an all-male lineup?

This is what I'm thinking you're thinking:

"We wanted to focus on emerging serverless devtools and we wanted to go as expert as we could in each respected tool so their collective voice would tell you Serverless is Ready. Why is it our fault they're all dudes? Thats all we could get"

But dudes (and I know you're dudes) listen.

The bar to expert is low, (I know this for sure) because:

I make a course on Terraform, now I'm Terraform expert
I run a single workshop on K8s now I'm a K8s expert
I do a Twitter-Space panel on GCP I'm now a GCP expert
I do fast-track talk on Security at a local meetup and I'm a AWS Security expert

You can flip or uplift basically anyone into an expert within a couple of good event opportunities.

Why aren't their more PoC, Womxn or Neurodivergent or etc if its so easy to become an expert?

Because many of our legacy "expert making" spaces where folks are flipped into experts are not inclusive or conducive for these folks.

When we pull from the most "expert of experts" the folks that have had years to climb the track are going to be overwhelming males.

Why is your network not diverse? Thats on you.

You can go on Twitter search #BlackTechTwitter and start filling your feed with folks that don't look like you and figure it out from there.

Its not a fast process it honestly could take 6 months to 2 years.

This is why you haven't seen me put on an online conference, because I want to have this stuff in place before I do anything.

Suggestion 3: Plan for an open CFP

If there is open Call For Proposal (CFP) I sure is heck didn't see it.

Have this at least 3 months out and ensure folks know about it.

Make it really easy for folks and tell exactly what you want.
Ruby always done a great job of this:
https://cfp.rubycentral.org/events/rubyconf-2022

Suggestion 4: Clear Table Stakes

When I'm running my AWS User Group I start each event with clear table steaks about creating an inclusive space.

I let neurodiverse folks know there is is a private channel of communication to me so they can for future accommodation so the events are inclusive for them
I let women know they don't need to go on-camera or that I will not tolerant unwanted attention from other community members
I let beginner know I'm not going to put up with the "back-of-the-room" "uh actually" stumper questions that make the idea of being a speaker such an anxiety-enduced experience
I let speakers know I provide 1-on-1 private sessions prior to events to help them maximize their outcome to get flipped to "expert"

Tell folks upfront, what are going to do to make this conference/event thing work for everyone?

If this too much work for you, sorry you should not be running a conference.

Its like folks thinking they can run their own Twitter Clone or Social media but they don't want to bother with Content Moderation and Trust of Safety lol.

Suggestion 5: Mentor in Other Successful Communities

If you try and build that network, if you trying to signal to folks this space is safe for your conference or event, but you aren't get anywhere, then instead of doing your own thing, contribute and learn with other folks that are doing it better than you.

ServerlessDays has done better, so be part of their community, until you can get traction on your own and try to match suite yourself or do better.

https://student.serverlessdays.io/

Suggestion 6: Turn your critics into your best allies

Nobody likes facing the folks that "called them out" but sometimes these folks turn out to be the best folks you can turn into allies.

Don't expect them to do the work for you, since educating and doing the leg work yourself is your responsibly, but if they're open to letting you listen and they want to do more, it can be great (especially decide to put on a conference again)

So reach out privately (or publicly) to the folks that called you out, offer personalized apologies and see where it goes from there.

Conclusion

✌️ ❤️ I'm hoping this provides a positive outcome to anyone running a conference. Peace and love everyone

❤️‍🔥 💬 I haven't ran a conference myself, so anyone who wants to "tap in" here with more experience than me and light up the comments lets hear it!

What if DEV became the new Twitter-like platform for developers?

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 04:14:40 +0000

Just playing a "what-if" game.

Do you think if Dev tweaked its content publishing model it might bring folks back in droves to Dev.to?

This is my personal opinion but as Dev audience has grown, the quality of posts have worsened, if Dev were just to extend headings to be the length of twitter posts with body articles being optional and more inline chat, could you imagine that?

Twitter <> Andrew

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 18:59:17 +0000

I was in a Twitter Space with the DevRel team, unforently. Twitter Spaces was crashing so I decided to outline feedback for the DevRel team here, and also to provide feedback to the Product team.

I am always looking for creative ways to provide an interactive experience to my followers, or to find a way of extending my Twitter community with an accompanying app.

I have a bunch of ideas but did not have time to outline them here.

DevRel Team

Twitter SDKs

DevRel team was saying that Twitter was too small of a company to support an official SDK in multiple libraries.

With the rise of cloud, being a polygot programmer is quite common. Let us have at least one official SDK.

Twitter OAuth for Common Web Frameworks

The largest friction of getting a Twitter App going is OAuth.
Everytime I create a Twitter app I have issues and it's hard to know why.

Just having sample apps that are known to work with up to date instructions could be used to help me debug my own apps or at least just build using different technology.

Ruby on Rails
Laravel
Django
NextJs

The language used for Twitter Projects is not the same defined for OAuth and so there is some technical uncertainty when implementing.

Twitter API - Twitter Space Analytics

Be able to extract analytics data from previous spaces

Twitter API - Find list of previous spaces

Be able to extract all my previous spaces

duration
start time
date
title
speakers

Twitter API - Create a Space

I want to be able to create a space via an API endpoint

Twitter API - Download a Space Recording

I want to be able to download or trigger a space to be delivered for download to my email.

Twitter API - Twitter Blue Long Videos

Does the API support long-form videos?
I will have to test to find out.

https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/v1/media/upload-media/api-reference/post-media-upload

Product Team

Crashing Twitter Spaces on Android

Twitter Spaces on the Android app crashes alot.

On the Twitter Space with the DevRel team, the app crashes six times.

If you're a speaker reconnecting it does not put you back to your previous status.

It's to the point where I'm considering getting an iOS device.

Speakers and Reactions in a Twitter Space not possible on the Web Desktop

In order to be a speaker or reactions, you have to use the mobile app.

I'd say 90% of my guest speakers make the mistake of joining from the Desktop Web.

I have a pre-show checklist, remind my speakers, but they still join initially from the desktop.

I would personally like to join from my Web Desktop, so I utilize my expensive RE20 microphone.

I can plug my USB preamp into my phone but I cannot monitor, and while running an experiment with an external USB microphone with a guest speaker the audio was worse.

Reactions would be great and seem like a low-hanging fruit for Web Desktop. At the start of the Twitter show I like to engage reoccurring guests by waving to them.

If they are joining on Web Desktop they can't receive a reaction.

Starting Point for Twitter Space Query String does not work.

I noticed that when sharing a Twitter Space in the query string you can set the start time. This is useful if you

Analytics for current and previous shows

In order to get an idea of analytics, I have to constantly collapse my space to see real-time attendance.

I noticed only when I record my space do I get end show analytics eg:

unique listeners during the entire space
highest amount of people joined at a given time

If you don't manually capture that data, you can't ever see it again. This is a bigger problem when a space crashes and reconnect does not happen ending the space.

Analytics are important for my guest speakers since they can report back the analytics to their organization.

It would also help me know if my spaces are growing, what are the trends so I can better optimize time and day.

Creation and Sharing Spaces

Its a real pain to create a space from the phone. I really wish I could just create them from the Desktop.

To promote my spaces I will create a banner graphic and then in the reply show the Twitter Space.

https://twitter.com/andrewbrown/status/1486350343084687362

I always create this from the desktop because if I wanted to post from my phone I have to download the graphic to my phone, and then when I try and post the banner graphic Twitter 90% hands forever trying to upload the banner. Reducing the banner size does not help.

In order to add the Twitter Space reminder as reply, the share functionality is really buggy.

I can't email it to myself, so next Ill try to DM it to someone. The search for DMs doesn't work properly so most of the time I end up just DM someone randomly so I can then log into the Web Desktop and copy it. Sometimes that doesn't work so I have to write out the Twitter Space manually.

Can only schedule one space in advance

In order to have a decent showing I need to market the space in advance and need people to set reminders.

However, you can only schedule 1 space at a time only 2 weeks in advance.

So my marketing is pinning the event.

I really wish I could schedule multiple spaces, so people could set reminders.

I wish I could just schedule all my spaces, then do an "upcoming show thread", and then in each of the replies have the reminders.

https://twitter.com/andrewbrown/status/1481723079642521604

Due to the current restrictions, I can only have a space every 2-3 days. If I could schedule multiple spaces I could have a good showing daily and sometimes I want to do daily spaces.

I tried to do AWS re:Invent virtually, and I had to create my own public calendar.

https://reinvent2021.100daysofcloud.com/

Filters previous Twitter Spaces

I wish I could quickly filter my previous twitter spaces based on recordings.
I have Twitter Blue and I suppose I could use Bookmarks.
Currently, I organize them using Blackmagic.so

Downloading Twitter Space Recordings

No idea how to download them. People say request a backup of your data. I've tried this 5 times. Never got the email. So I have no idea of the raw recordings would be here.

I really want to clip out soundbites to create an audiogram to reneged past events or drive people from LinkedIn over to Twitter.

Social Card for Twitter Spaces

When I share a direct like to a Twitter Space recording / set reminder, it just shows my Name and Avatar. So I have to then create my own graphic and then put the link, but on LinkedIn people are clicking on the graphic which goes no where.

Twitter Space Banner

I really wish I could upload a banner graphic that is set as the background of the Recording / Set Reminder.

This way I would not have to have to reply and bury the recording.

If the embedded Recording / Set Reminder / Listener box allowed me to tag who the guest speakers then I would probably skip a graphic altogether.

Speaker Creep

Sometimes people who are looking to grow their audience want to come up as a speaker just so they can get follows or be marked as a speaker.

I wish I could designate who the speakers are for the space to mitigate these clout chasers.

Twitter Blue - Long Videos

I was not sure of Twitter Blue Longer Videos were only for other Twitter Blue folks, or only on Web. So I delayed getting Twitter Blue for months until someone who already used it confirmed the behaviour.

Twitter Blue - Undo

I find this feature incredibly useful because I'm dyslexic and I find until I publish then I notice my mistake deleted and this happens like 5 times. Undo feature is great!

I wish the Undo and Send Now buttons where swapped so Send now is on the right.

I sometimes find myself going back to Undo because I keep thinking the right button will publish based on how another platform would place and highlight their publish button.

Super Followers - Canada

I create alot of educational content for tech and cloud. On average 100 videos per week.

It would be easy for me to produce exclusive paid content on the platform, like create an entire course but Super Followers is not available in Canada, so I cannot deliver this experience.

Revue Newsletter

I wanted to do a rollup of my best tweets and expand on them in a Revue Newsletter but I realized that Revue Newsletter takes up too much real estate at top of the fold, hurting my numbers for pinning things like Twitter Spaces.

I have found rotating pinned content essential for my community growth.

I have not seen much success with other Revue Newsletters on much larger Twitter accounts.

TwitterSpace Recording Icon

Every time I run a Twitter Space: "Is it recorded?"
An indicator would be great.
I guess I could just put a graphic in my banner that would mitigate this issue.

Blocked People in Twitter Space

I ended up on a Twitter Space with two people I blocked.
My block rate is in the single digits.

People You Might Like

Twitter recommends me, people, I do not like and I can never dismiss so I have to see the same recommendation on Desktop every time I join.

Twitter Space - Categories

Twitter updated it so you choose a category title and a sub title. The entirety of the Technology category was Crypto, and other junk topics. I eventually found after a few spaces "Tech events" in the middle of the tag cloud.

Twitter Communities

You can create communities eg. AWS, Google Cloud, Cloud Native where tweets are scoped to a community.

How to create a community was unknown to me, and so these communities ended up getting scooped and are essentially being run by people who are just sitting on the community name, blocking any further community development.

I could put effort into these communities but it's frustrating that someone else will always be moderators/organizers of the space, so I'm helping someone else grow for someone else.

Will you consider your carbon footprint when configuring your compute workloads?

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 16:49:12 +0000

At Google, engineers get to spend 20% of their time on internal projects of their own design and Steren built a free public-facing customer tool to help you consider the carbon footprint when provisioning your resources in a specific region.

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If you expand the cards you get a bit more detail.

Try the Google Cloud Carbon Footprint Region Picker yourself.

Do you think you will ever consider your carbon-foot print when using cloud services?
Would you ever want to see a carbon-foot print as part of the cost and usage reporting within your cloud service provider (CSPs)?

Did you know there is a Forem server just for just the cloud? www.thedev.cloud

This is what gatekeeping looks like in the cloud industry (or how to not be a reply guy)

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Tue, 20 Jul 2021 16:43:45 +0000

I was recently working on expanding the definition of multi-cloud based on what I had observed as a shift in language being used by cloud vendors and cloud service providers.

So I thought to go to twitter to give a two sentence example of the expansion of the term to gauge interest before I wrote a new article.

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My primary goal is to make cloud more accessible by being inclusive of people who do not yet use a cloud service provider (CSP) but primary rely on cloud services like Heroku, Github, JIRA to treat them like first-class cloud citizens.

I am open to hearing people voice their thoughts, but when it becomes a back and forth, where I've been pulled into unwanted argument that doesn't relent, when my replies serve to save face and the end the conversation for future discussion on a more suited platform, and yet the person continues I know I am experiencing gatekeeping.

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What does gatekeeping look like in the cloud industry? 👇

Gatekeeping comes in many forms, and one form of gatekeeping which is the easiest to come across is the argument around the definition of emerging terminologies. For example:

When someone argues DevOps isn't a thing, because they were doing this stuff before DevOps existed, and they relentlessly argue the dismantling of the term.
When someone argues Zero Trust Model isn't a thing, because they were doing this stuff before Zero Trust Model existed, and they relentlessly argue the dismantling of the term.
When someone argues Multi-cloud term can't be expanded or changed, because they were doing this stuff and have an expected definition, and they relentlessly argue any form of change of the term.
When someone argues that Serverless has to be described as a mindset and can't just be utilizing serverless services because they were doing this stuff before anyone else was doing this stuff.

While it's possible that terms may be overused and become annoying, you need to consider terms like DevOps have done more to bring people into the fold of systems operations than would not have been.

The gatekeeper's thoughts about gatekeeping

If you were to confront a gatekeeper, its not hard to predict the outcome:

A gatekeeper's first thought is we cannot have any discussion around tech terminologies because they'll be viewed upon as gatekeeping! Evenly possibly its a silencing or muting tactic to surpass criticism.

To which I say, we can have productive conversations, but you need to be aware of:

your position in the hierarchy relative to who you're talking to
the format of the discussion and its limitations
the intended shared outcome

before you open your mouth to begin a discussion so it does not become an argument.

Once a gatekeeper not always a gatekeeper

I am certain that I have had instances of gatekeeping in the past. (I am Star Trek fan!)

But it's not a permanent label, and it can be mild to severe.

Is it Gatekeeping and Self-preservation?

I think Chris had a good thought here.

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Is there a distinguish between Gatekeeping and Self-preservation, and can one be acting in a Self-preservation way without also being a gatekeeper?

I would think that to preserve one's position, a bi-product of that would be gatekeeping.

Conclusion

It's not my goal here to convince a person they are gatekeeping, for you to confront instances of gatekeepers, but to validate that it does occur, and what I think it looks like.

What does gatekeeping look like to you?
Do you have any personal stories you can could share with us?

Is PolyWork the new LinkedIn for Developers?

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 13:41:28 +0000

P.S. I just want to frontload this article to ask you what is your opinion about the new professional network? I'd love to read the comments. I want to get the conversation going so this is why I wrote this long form post.

What is Polywork?

Polywork is a professional network, and it could be described as an alternative to LinkedIn though It would be better to compare them as the following:

LinkedIn — A resume directory with a social-professional network built adjacent to your resume profile.
Polywork — A historical professional portfolio or journal that also is the social-professional network.

I think the co-founder was previously a designer at Google, and the marketing and onboarding give you a strong impression that UX is this team's immediate strength.

UX alone is not enough, so let us dive into a few thoughts about this new platform.

What can I do in Polywork?

Polywork as of the time of this article is incomplete. They are slowly bringing users into their network via invites and with a strong feedback loop, ensuring the features they engineer will deliver on their service's core principles.

What you can currently do:

create a profile
choose an AI assistant
create posts to your professional timeline (you can backdate to anytime)
follower other users
contact other users via strictly defined opportunities

What you cannot do:

you cannot like a post
you cannot comment on a post
you share a post to your professional timeline
you cannot see public metrics about posts

Some of these "cannots" I think, are by design, and others are latent features yet to be released. I think we can expect to see commenting, and I think Polywork may decide not to have likes or show metrics.
The latter is a strong possibility when we see Instagram talking about giving its users the options to hide mentions and metrics.

This stems from being socially aware of the negative effects on a user's mental health when putting too much value on social media statistics.

Who is Polywork targeting?

Superficially speaking, it would look like Polywork is building a professional network that strongly appeals to the aesthetics of young professionals eg. influencers, developer advocates, designers, hustlers, lifestyle entrepreneurs, models and musicians. So far, these have been the early adopters.

It is important to put aside the presented aesthetic and talk about the function and future of resumes because it becomes apparent that this network is for everyone.

Resume 2.0

A resume is a pdf you email to a company, but another way to see is that it is a protocol (standardized method of communication)

A resume is job-history-oriented, and the we verify an applicants authenticity is via the resume protocol:

analyze the written composition of the resume for anomalies
references for a third-party attestment
interrogate an applicant against their written content at a per task level

Shifting from Job-Oriented to Activity-Oriented

With a resume it primes the hiring manager or recruiter to use job-history oriented as the filter:

Is this person switching jobs too frequently?
Does this person have gaps been workplaces?

The problem with this kind of analysis is that these are superficial concerns and do not tell if an applicant is qualified. Also, it does not adapt to the market as a whole such as:

more people want only to be part-time to be their own entrepreneur
companies are offering fewer full-time roles
companies are offering less long-term stable roles
the rise of a generation who knows how to produce public-facing content
the rise of a new global workforce from developing countries and not sticking to resume norms

Wouldn't it be more valuable if you could filter and explore activities?
If you still needed a summary, wouldn't it be nice if an AI could be trusted to generate the cliff notes from sourced materials?

Change of the Composition of Resumes

AI is becoming more accessible and valuable. Look at GPT3 and CopyAI, and it is getting good at generating content that is indistinguishable from human-generated content.

What happens when your entire resume can be spoofed by AI and cannot be discerned as being generated by AI with another AI?
You will need more granular information to show where information has been sourced from.

Attestment

References have not been legitimate for years. Anyone can pretend to be your reference; anyone can endorse your work without tangible proof.

People on LinkedIn will endorse me as being knowledgeable with AWS. The reason they endorse me is that I help them pass their certification exam. It would be more useful if the proof of endorsement was tied to an activity such as posting their cloud certification, which I helped them obtain through my free study course and then associated it with me.

In LinkedIn, you can kind of replicate this by mentioning people on a post in the LinkedIn public time-stream, but it becomes eventually lost since it cannot be easily filtered because LinkedIn social network with adjacent, not your resume.

Opportunity-based instead of Spam-based

Direct Messaging on LinkedIn, on the whole, is people messaging you for unsolicited services. It has us treat every connection or relationship with suspicion and apprehension.

Polywork has fives messaging a purpose before being sent to a target user, and this is the first big step to cut down on spam.

I could see them expanding this feature with their AI assistant to assess whether the sent message is genuine, meaningful and a wanted communication, and the system could quickly penalize unapologetic spammers via an internal karma system.

It could also be that activity tags could be associated with contact types. This would allow contacting users to be forced to understand the context of what they are messaging for and do their homework to understand if there is genuinely is alignment.

Can't LinkedIn copy these features like how they can copy Instagram User Stories and Clubhouse audio chats?

LinkedIn could replicate these features, but the fundamental way their social network works like connections and resumes profile the public live stream, these features would be subject to exploit that render them not as valuable.

LinkedIn would be better off acquiring or partnering with Polywork and position themselves as a job board and resume platform.
LinkedIn Resumes are not useless, but their value and purpose are going to change, and LinkedIn is not positioned to deliver on Resume 2.0

What does this Polywork have to do with developers?

The normal combination today for developers applying to a job is Resume + LinkedIn + Github.
Learning in public like #100DaysOfCode and #100DaysOfCloud challenges help provide structure around these proof of work.

Github is great that it you can use a repo as a journal, but even for 100DaysOfCloud I have to tell people take those entries and tie social proof to them like on Twitter on LinkedIn and we don't have useful social-relationship metadata with these github entries for discoverability.

I can't tell you how many people completed the 100DaysOCloud challenge, I can't find journals github unless people self-submit, I can't consistent filter to find the 100th day on Twitter or Linked since people are inconsistent with tagging.

Polywork can make solve all this in one package and I think that will be better for developer communities for their proof of work.

How does DEV fit with Polywork?

DEV has a user profile that can be customized, but I think Polywork can allow you to showcase your best work, and by being selective of posting your best DEV articles into your Polywork timeline. Rich relational metadata can built ontop of your content.

I don't see Polywork replacing DEV for dicussion, because DEV is a forum quasi-blog which excels for more in-depth and long-form discussion.

Summary

There is more to Polywork that I did not have to cover: like

community building
content discovery
user and relationship discovery
professional identity 2.0

But I want you to know that Polywork is not just for young professionals; it's for everyone, and whether you decide to use it today, tomorrow or three years or five years from now, it will become a valuable tool you will use at some point.

My recommendation is if you are not yet ready to adopt, sign up and get your handle, so when you are ready, you aren't andrewbrown543242.

You don't need an invite to reserve your handle, just signup at https://www.polywork.com
- You want your first follower?
- Follow me at https://www.polywork.com/andrewbrown
  - I'll be sure to give you a follow back!

If you were the new CEO of Amazon Web Services what would be your first executive order?

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 15:35:10 +0000

Andy Jassy who is the current CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is going to be the new CEO of Amazon. It's uncertain who will be next to the CEO of AWS.

If you could have full control of AWS what would you decree?

I would add a Dark Theme to the AWS Console.

AWS Heroes React to AWS re:Invent 2020 Announcements 🤯

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Thu, 03 Dec 2020 23:03:43 +0000

🚨 During re:Invent this article is being constantly updated.

👋 Keep checking in to see new reactions!

👉👉 Jump to the reactions 👈👈

Week 1 — Andy Jassy's (CEO) Keynote, Amplify Admin UI
Mark Nunnikhoven, Álvaro Hernández, Luca Bianchi, Teri Radichel, Forrest Brazeal, Matthieu Napoli, Chase Douglas, Yan Cui, Franck Pachot, Matt Coulter, Dave Stauffacher, Michael Hart, Farrah Campbell, Jeremy Daly, Sebastian Müller, Chris Williams,
Week 2 — ML and Infrastrucutre Keynotes
Tomasz Ptak, Ken Collins, Zamira Jaupaj, Mike Chambers, Luca Bianchi, Gillian Armstrong, Dave Stauffacher, Kesha Williams, Juv Chan
Week 3 — Werner Vogels's (CTO) Keynote
Renato Losio, Mark Nunnikhoven

Preamble

What is re:Invent?

re:Invent is Amazon Web Service's (AWS) 5-day technology conference held in Las Vegas Nevada. Last year's conference had 65,000+ attendance from around the world.

Why is re:Invent so important?

re:Invent is when AWS announces new features, improvements and cloud services. It's also a lot of fun, with hands-on training, creative demos project, lucrative swag and more!

What is different this year?

Due to the world situation AWS has made a few changes:

The conference is 100% virtual
Attendance is free (you still need to register)
The conference is 3 weeks long

What is an AWS Hero?

An AWS Hero is a recognized community leader in a specific category of cloud technologies.

What is this article?

There are thousands of talks and hundreds of announcements, and if you live a busy life, it can be hard to find the time to digest all the changes.

This reaction article is to help contextualize the AWS announcements with some personal thoughts or expert opinion so you have an idea of how you can apply these in your future workloads.

AWS Hero Reactions and Analysis

Week 1

Andy Jassy Keynote, AWS Re:Invent 2020

No longer do we really have to worry about significant up front entry costs, capacity limits, or start up times. We have more power available via one API call than an entire data center from ten years ago. But if you don’t change how you approach using these tools, you won’t see... (read full article)

By Mark Nunnikhoven, AWS Community Hero

AWS announces Babelfish: open source Postgres with SQL Server compatibility

But if it weren’t enough, SQL Server equivalent catalogs and also the SQL Server wire protocol (TDS) has been implemented. This means that you will be able to talk to Postgres Babelfish as if it were... (read full article)

By Álvaro Hernández, AWS Data Hero

Serverless comes to machine learning with container image support in AWS Lambda

AWS announced a long-awaited update for AWS Lambda by many developers and data scientists because it could change the way we build functions. It comes with bonus features that make this release something very welcome in the serverless world: starting from today it is possible to... (read full article)

By Luca Bianchi, AWS Serverless Hero

Andy Jassy’s 8 keys to success ~ AWS re:Invent 2020 Keynote

AWS is at the top of the Gartner Magic Quadrant in 2020 — again. In fact, they widened the gap between themselves and next closest provider in the past year. Andy Jassy provided some keys to success at the AWS in his... (read full article)

By Teri Radichel, AWS Community Hero

5 takeaways from Andy Jassy’s big re:Invent keynote

To tie all that together, we got AWS Proton – a fully managed deployment service for containers and serverless apps. Notice how those two concepts are starting to blend together? Watch for that trend to... (read full article)

By Forrest Brazeal, AWS Serverless Hero

AWS Lambda can now run PHP using Docker Containers

The good news is that while Lambda functions are limited to 250MB, containers can be up to 10GB. That will certainly help when deploying large monoliths to Lambda. One limitation to keep in mind is that after... (read full article)

By Matthieu Napoli, AWS Serverless Hero

Wait, did AWS just rewrite the manual again for building apps?

Andy Jassy's re:Invent keynote today was chock full of new features and services. I'm here to help break down the most important news related to modern application architecture… (read full article)

By Chase Douglas, AWS Serverless Hero

Serverless at re:Invent 2020 – hot takes #1

Lambda now bills you by the ms as opposed to 100 ms. So if your function runs for 42ms you will be billed for 42ms, not 100ms. This instantly makes everyone’s lambda bills cheaper without anyone having to lift a finger. It’s the best kind of optimization! However, this might not mean much in… (read full article)

By Yan Cui, AWS Serverless Hero

Database announcements at re:Invent 2020

There are 3 important new launches announced around databases: Babelfish for Aurora, Aurora Serverless v2 and AWS Glue Elastic Views but let’s start by a recap of the pre-reInvent new features from this year… (read full article)

By Franck Pachot, AWS Data Hero

Deploying a ML model using the new AWS Lambda Container Image Functionality

This week at re:Invent we saw AWS announce the ability to bring your own container to Lambda functions. The scenario that gets me super excited is the deployment of ML models inside Lambda. Before, it was just too awkward for most use cases to do ML in Lambda but I will demonstrate below that it is very easy now… (read full article)

By Matt Coulter, AWS DevTools Hero

An AWS Hero reacts to the io2 Block Express announcement

I want to talk about the elegance that is io2 Block Express and why it truly is the first "Cloud SAN". In a traditional high performance and highly available Storage Area Network, data traffic between a storage array and the consuming server rides on a dedicated network… (read full article)

By Dave Stauffacher, AWS Community Hero

Using container images with AWS Lambda

Container Image Support has just been announced for AWS Lambda and it’s a pretty big deal — I’m very excited because it’s something I’ve wanted for years… (read full article)

By Michael Hart, AWS Serverless Hero

The Year of Serverless

Danilo and Sheen are incredibly smart engineers and have done great things at the LEGO group. They’re also both great at sharing their knowledge. From the talk abstract: After experiencing scaling issues on Black Friday, the LEGO team fully refactored its monolith to serverless microservices... (read the full article)

By Farrah Campbell, AWS Serverless Hero

Aurora Serverless v2: The Good, the Better, and the Possibly Amazing

That all changed with the introduction of Amazon Aurora Serverless v2. I finally got access to the preview and spent a few hours trying to break it. My first impression? This thing might just be a silver bullet! I know that’s a bold statement. 😉 But even though I’ve only been using it for a few hours… (read the full article)

By Jeremy Daly, AWS Serverless Hero

AWS Lambda Container Image Support example for Node.js

I build a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment setup for AWS Lambda functions with docker images using GitHub Actions. Together with Semantic Releases and Conventional Commits, you can focus on writing your code. Automation takes care everything else... (read the full article)

By Sebastian Müller, AWS Serverless Hero

re:Invent 2020 re:Cap (week 1)

A tacit acknowledgement that other computers exist on the planet that DO NOT belong to AWS. This will make multicloud efforts easier even though Jassy still did not say the word “multicloud”... (read the full article)

By Chris Williams, AWS Community Hero

Week 2

Teach me, Amazon CodeGuru

CodeGuru Reviewer is a code analysis utility provided by AWS. It initially provided analysis for Java, this year Python was added. I haven't used it before, mainly because all of my Java code is work code and I haven't had much to run it against… (read the full article)

By Tomasz Ptak, AWS Machine Learning Hero

Lambda Containers with Rails; A Perfect Match!

A few weeks ago when I started this serverless & container series we talked about how to use Docker in your AWS Lambda projects with SAM. Who could have known that today I get to share in the recent AWS Lambda Container Image Support news by announcing that Lamby works out of the box with both ZIP and Container deployment packages...
(read the full article)

By Ken Collins, AWS Serverless Hero

AWS Machine Learning keynote live re:Invent 2020

A detailed breakdown of the announcements for the AWS ML Keynote... (read the full article)

By Zamira Jaupaj, AWS Community Hero

#ImAtReInvent - AWS reInvent 2020 Machine Learning Keynote Analysis Special

By Mike Chambers, AWS Machine Learning Hero

AWS Heroes reactions to Swami Sivasubramanian keynote on Machine Learning

Since talking about machine learning is super cool, and AWS is announcing a lot of new features and services, Swami is not the only keynote with AI stuff in it: Andy Jassy delivered a couple of mind-blowing news last Tuesday, and Dr. Matt Wood joined Swami to further deep dive... (read the full article)

By Luca Bianchi, AWS Serverless Hero

All the Machine Learning Announcements at AWS re:Invent 2020

Feeling a little overwhelmed by all the Machine Learning announcements so far? Here’s your quick catch-up... (read the full article)

By Gillian Armstrong, AWS Machine Learning Hero

Recap of the Re:Invent 2020 S3 announcements

This week I thought it would be good to recap the list of S3 announcements that have been made thus far during the conference... (read the full article)

By Dave Stauffacher, AWS Community Hero

SageMaker Clarify is the most important announcement of re:Invent 2020

I literally cheered when Swami Sivasubramanian announced Amazon SageMaker Clarify, which expands the capabilities of SageMaker by detecting and mitigating bias in datasets and models. I believe Amazon SageMaker Clarify is the most important announcement out of AWS re:Invent this year... (read the full article)

By Kesha Williams, AWS Machine Learning Hero

AWS re:Invent 2020 Machine Learning Keynote Recap and Highlights

Welcome to the first-ever Machine Learning Keynote at AWS re:Invent. Let’s recap the key highlights in their chronological order... (read the full article)

By Juv Chan, AWS Machine Learning Hero

Amazon S3 Now Delivers Strong Read After Write Consistency

To guarantee higher availability and better performances, S3 has for years relied on an eventual consistency model. During the first week of re:invent, AWS announced that S3 now supports strong read-after-write consistency.... (read the full article)

By Renato Losio, AWS Data Hero

Breaking Down The Werner Vogels Keynote – re:Invent 2020

When Dr. Werner Vogels, the CTO of Amazon, takes the stage, builders listen. Why? Because every year Dr. Vogels, or simply “Werner” as he’s better known, speaks directly to the core challenges that people building in the cloud face... (read the full article)

By Mark Nunnikhoven, AWS Community Hero

AWS Community Builders Program

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Wed, 12 Aug 2020 14:19:07 +0000

I'm Andrew Brown 👋

I'm an AWS Community Hero
I moderate the #AWS tag here on DEV
and I provide mentorship to the AWS Community Builders

AWS has an exciting new community program that you can be apart of that is open to all technical levels, the primary requirement is a passion for AWS 💓.

In fact some DEV members here are builders such as:

So let me tell you all about it!

What is AWS Community Builders?

The AWS Community Builders (CB) is a cloud community program officially organized by AWS. The program is designed to support enthusiastic AWS community members by providing:

Technical mentorship
Exclusive networking opportunities
Virtual speak events

🧠 Think of it like getting special attention and support from AWS

AWS Community Builder Categories

AWS Community Builders are designated but not limited to a very specific AWS topic/category. The following categories:

Networking and Content Delivery
Storage
Containers
Machine Learning
Serverless
Gravitron / Arm Development
Data (Databases, Analytics, Blockchain)
Developer Tools
Game Tech
Mobile and Web Apps
Management, Governance and Migration
Security, Identity & Compliance

🧠 Focus your attention on a specific category of interest

Why would want to join the AWS Community Builders?

AWS Product Team Previews

AWS Product Teams are the AWS engineers who are responsible for building AWS Services and Products

Exclusive webinars with AWS engineers demoing of a preview of AWS Services, Product or Service Features
Direct feedback loop to influence developer of pre-release features
Opportunities to write / blog about preview features

AWS Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

An SME is a person recognized with having expert knowledge in a particular topic eg. Cloud Security
Exclusive and early access webinar, Q&A and presentations from:

AWS Developer/Startup Advocates
AWS Product Marketing Managers
AWS Heroes
Jeff Barr 🤞

🧠 Fast track your AWS knowledge and gain unique community opportunities

AWS Promotional Credits

AWS Credits are the equivalent of US dollars that can be spent on most AWS cloud resources.
These AWS credits are provided to you to power creative community projects.

Accepted members will receive AWS Credits

AWS Networking

When joining the AWS Community Builders you are networked with all other active builders

Exclusive access to the AWS Community Builders private Slack Channel

How do you join the AWS Community Builders?

Step 1 - Apply

On the AWS Community Builders page, you have to click apply:

https://amzn.to/33gDSJY

Step 2 - Choose a category

You need to choose your preferred first and second technical category. If accepted into the program you’ll be assigned to that category.

Categories help align applicants with groups so AWS can align resources to the group. Anyone in any category can participate in virtually every opportunity, so you’re not limited by being in one group.

Step 3 - Share your cloud story

Share your cloud story in 1000 characters or less to AWS

Step 4 - Share your Social Media Profiles

Step 5 - Share Links to Blogs, Videos, Events etc…

Step 6 - Fill out Survey

Fill out a very short survey about your online and in-person community activities

Program Requirments

You must be 18 years or older
Open to everyone globally (with exception to countries under US embargo)
Applications are reviewed and accepted twice a year
There is no cost to apply or to hold membership
Eligible for all technical levels: Level 100 (Beginner), Level 200 (Intermediate), Level 300 (Advanced), Level 400 (Expert)
Technical accuracy and community engagement can be more important than technical depth.
Membership lasts for a year, and you must re-apply every year to renew membership.

I want to become a builder but I need ideas

If you are enthusiastic about AWS but have yet to build up any online content here are some suggestions

Submit a long-form and in-depth article to freeCodeCamp.org for publication
Create a cloud developer blog on Hashnode.com and document your journey
Write short “How-to” tutorials on DEV.to under the AWS tag
Start a bi-monthly Twitch.tv live-stream or join AWS live-streams and engage in the comments.
Start an email newsletter for your interested topic and send out consolidated weekly links eg. AWS Cloud Security
Start a technical podcast and publish on Spotify
Participate in the #100DaysOfCloud challenge
Start a LinkedIn Group for your specific topic of interest
Start a Youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/FooBar_codes
Participate as a speaker at AWS User Groups https://aws.amazon.com/developer/community/usergroups/
Teach a topic on a Twitter with of tweet-size lessons chained together by replies
Reshare AWS Developer Advocate content and bring in engagement

Once I’m accepted as a “builder” what am I supposed to do?

Join Virtual Calls
Participate in mentorship opportunities
Continue to share or produce educational and technical content
Actively engage with and help build the AWS community
Demonstrate continued interest in learning more about AWS

Summary

I hope that gives you an idea of the AWS Builders community program and I hope you apply and I see you on the other side!

Again here's the link to apply.

👉 https://amzn.to/33gDSJY 👈

Get an application in before September 15th

Rich Draft

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 13:58:42 +0000