In May, I published a short episode of the podcast about my daughter Olivia being diagnosed with leukemia. It's been a rough couple of months, but I wanted to share how things are going, what the plan is, and give a tremendous thank you to the community.
Have you ever wished you could quit your job and go create content all day long while working for yourself? You can! In this episode, Yan Cui joins Allen Helton to talk about full-time content creation and consultancy within the serverless world. The two discuss Yan's journey to greatness, weigh in on the use of generative AI when it comes to content, and cover tips and tricks to get better engagement.
About Yan Yan is an AWS Serverless Hero offering training and consulting on AWS and serverless applications. With experience running production workloads at scale in AWS since 2010, Yan has a proven track record of leveraging technology to enhance business outcomes. He has served as an architect and principal engineer across various industries, including banking, e-commerce, social networks, live streaming, and mobile gaming. Yan has worked on large-scale systems handling millions of concurrent users and processing billions of events daily. He runs the site "The Burning Monk", where he shares serverless tips, insights, and best practices, and hosts the podcast Real World Serverless, featuring discussions with practitioners from around the globe.
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I recently had a significant life event that has turned my world upside down. In this bonus episode, I share the story and let you know what you can do to help.
Blog post: https://readysetcloud.io/blog/allen.helton/a-personal-update
GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-olivias-fight-against-leukemia
You've probably seen some posts lately about the Believe in Serverless community. If you've been wondering what it is and why there's so much noise around it - great news! This episode is all about the community including what it is, where it's been, what it has to offer, and where it's going. Join Allen and four of the community champions, Ben Pyle, Danielle Heberling, Andres Moreno, and James Eastham, as they talk about this amazing new community. There's never been a better time to join!
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There's no question that tech is booming all over the world. But how has it been received in places that have harder access to the internet, like Africa? Join Allen as he talks with Tobenna Nwokike about how technology is transforming Nigeria into something completely new. They discuss the cultural and economic changes brought on by tech, how easy it is to break into the field, the assistance the Nigerian government is providing for those who want to get into it, and much more. The whole world is embracing high-tech, making lives better everywhere it goes.
About Tobenna
Tobenna Nwokike is a software developer with over a decade of experience in the field. As a Senior Cloud Engineer/Consultant at Serverless Guru, he navigates the complex realm of cloud technologies, all while working remotely from Nigeria. Tobenna has a strong passion for uplifting the next generation of tech talent and has mentored over 30 software engineers ensuring they are well equipped for the job market/startup space.
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When was the last time you attended an event? It was probably virtual, right? Why is that? The tech industry has moved more and more virtual the past few years and we're starting to slowly but surely crawl our way back to in-person. In this episode, Raphael Manke and Allen Helton talk about their experiences with getting together in person and how it compares to virtual events. They talk about starting your own AWS user group, the value you get from networking with locals, their favorite stories from meetups, and much more.
About Raphael
Raphael is a full-stack web developer leveraging serverless technologies in his day-to-day business. He helps customers build reliable and scalable solutions with minimal operational overhead. On his cloud journey, he shares his insights as a public speaker and connects other AWS enthusiasts on his local AWS Usergroup in Germany.
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Event-driven architectures (EDA) is an intimidating subject for many, but don't confuse complexity with unfamiliarity. While EDA might seem unnecessarily complex, it's a necessary architectural pattern as the world goes more and more distributed. Join James Eastham and Allen Helton as they discuss all things EDA, ranging from what to put in your events to how EDA compares to request/response architectures to observability. Whether you're looking to get into events for the first time or have been practicing for years, the episode is for you.
#### About James
James is a Senior Cloud Architect at Amazon Web Services and content creator. He has over 10 years of experience in software, at all layers of the application stack. He has worked in front-line support, database administration, back-end development and now works with some of the biggest companies in the world architecting systems using AWS technologies.
James also produces content on YouTube, focused on building applications with serverless technologies and event-driven architecture.
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Join Johannes and Allen as they talk about the world of modern CI/CD. The duo describes exactly what CI/CD is and is not and how your pipeline might be a bit more involved than you think. Johannes shares what he considers "the best" pipeline in the industry today, describes his experience with Amazon Code Catalyst, and goes into detail about a project he's working on to make pipeline generation a snap. Whether you're looking to get started with CI/CD or you're an experienced veteran, there's a little bit of something for everyone in this episode.
About Johannes
Johannes is a Sr. DevOps Engineer at FICO where he contributes to the FICO® Platform. He is a builder at heart and loves to solve problems in different flavors. He believes in full CI/CD automation and everything required to run the solution being written in code.
Johannes was in the AWS Community Builders program from 2022 to 2023, he founded the AWS User Group Bergstrasse, helped to start the AWS Community DACH Förderverein, and is part of the team that organizes the AWS Community Day in the DACH region. He also writes about his experiences on his personal blog and recently started a YouTube channel to share experiences and best practices related to CI/CD. His mission is to empower developers to start their new projects with a true CI/CD pipeline, enabling rapid value generation through automation.
He enjoys sharing knowledge as a public speaker, but also helping and mentoring engineers who are starting their cloud journey. He believes in true collaboration within the AWS community to make the individuals successful.
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They say the best way to learn is by doing, but is that always true? Does the way people effectively learn change the further they get into their career? Join Luc and Allen as they discuss continuing education as a developer and what they've experienced over the last decade. The two cover the benefits of side projects and the impact taking them to production has both from a learning perspective and the effectiveness of how it sharpens your skills.
About Luc
Luc is an AWS Serverless Hero and Principal Engineer at PostNL, where he designs and builds enterprise-scale serverless architectures. He is well known for his articles, presentations, videos, and podcasts about AWS. Luc strives to help team members, colleagues, and local and global AWS communities embrace and grow their skill sets so they too can experience the joy, fun, and sheer scale serverless brings to application development.
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Join Allen Helton and Jeremiah Dunham as they explore math in the world of computer science. Do developers use it as much as they thought they would or is it abstracted away to a point where we have no idea? What if there was a way to use math to prove the correctness of your code instead of writing unit tests? Guess what? It's possible. Tune into the episode as Allen and Jeremiah talk about the future of testing and exactly how you can (or can't) guarantee your code does what you expect it to.
About Jeremiah
Jeremiah is a Senior Software Development Manager on the AWS IAM Access Analyzer team. In 9+ years at Amazon, he's launched new services and features (AWS Elemental MediaStore and AWS IAM Access Analyzer custom policy checks), helped hundreds of people adopt AWS (including your podcast host!), received 10 patents, and spoken at several conferences, including re:Invent and re:Inforce. He cares deeply about using math to make the world a better place. When he's not thinking about things related to math, you'll probably find him running or enjoying a craft beer.
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The serverless community loves talking about serverless. Despite the amazing innovations happening all around us, we still talk about cold starts and scalability like they are new. But what if we didn't? What would it take to get to a post-serverless era? What does post-serverless even mean? Join Jeremy Daly and Allen Helton as they discuss what the future holds for serverless and how the game needs to change in order for us to build software faster and better than ever before.
About Jeremy
Jeremy is a senior technology leader with more than 25 years of experience managing the development of complex web and mobile applications for domestic and international businesses. Currently, he is the CEO at Ampt and an AWS Serverless Hero. He writes extensively about serverless on his blog and publishes a weekly newsletter about all things serverless called Off-by-none. Jeremy has a soft spot for helping people solve problems using serverless and frequently works with companies and individuals transitioning away from the traditional “server-full” approach. You can find him chatting about serverless on X, in several forums and Slack groups, and at conferences around the world.
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Have you ever wondered how it works when you tell Alexa to turn off your lights and you're suddenly sitting in darkness? The Internet of Things (IoT) is all around us - from automating smart homes to alerting us when an industrial piece of equipment is malfunctioning. Join Allen and Rohan Desai as they discuss how SmartThings integrates hundreds of devices from different vendors to provide a robust, unified experience for consumers. The duo talk about the serverless nature of IoT and dive into the details of how it all works.
About Rohan
Rohan Desai is a Software Engineering Tech Lead at DoorDash, where he focuses on solving consumer problems at scale. His expertise lies in distributed systems, serverless computing and building Voice User Interfaces in the field of IoT. Prior to DoorDash, he worked at Yahoo and Samsung SmartThings and is also a Senior Member of IEEE. He is passionate about building highly scalable and available systems using serverless. He is also a speaker at conferences like the Samsung Developers Conference.
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If you've been around the serverless community for any length of time, you've undoubtedly heard of Serverless Guru. But do you know what they do? Listen to Sam Lock and Allen discuss the day-in and day-out of being a serverless developer, cover the emerging importance of automating boilerplate code, and of course, dive into generative AI.
About Sam
Sam is a serverless developer for Serverless Guru and an AWS Educator on the Toptal freelance platform. He's passionate about keeping serverless simple and educating others on anything and everything AWS. When he's not surfing Stack Overflow and Google, Sam is busy surfing at his nearest point break, usually south-east England.
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What's the difference between developer advocacy, tech evangelism, and solutions architecture? A few years ago, all these job titles would have sounded made up. But in the mad rush we know as "cloud development", each of them have distinct roles and importance. Join Michael "Focus Otter" Liendo and Allen Helton as they dive into what makes developer advocacy unique and relevant. The two discuss "mid-funnel" advocacy, how teams should utilize DA's, and touch on imposter syndrome.
About Michael
Michael is a senior developer advocate for AppSync at AWS. He has a passion for educating others and does so via his blog, videos, and speaking at conferences. Michael focuses on fullstack development and is particularly interested in Micro-SaaS applications. He also goes by Focus Otter, which is his highly recognizable and influential tech brand.
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Have you ever wondered why querying your data lakes were so slow? Or, if you're like Allen, did you ever wonder what a data lake actually is? Join Cliff Crosland as he explains how the Scanner team has changed data lakes forever by going serverless. This episode is a showcase of some brilliant engineering to solve a problem in a serverless manner.
About Cliff
Cliff is the CEO and co-founder of Scanner.dev, a security data lake product built for scale, speed, and cost efficiency. Prior to founding Scanner, he was a Principal Engineer at Cisco where he led the backend infrastructure team for the Webex People Graph. He was also the engineering lead for the data platform team at Accompany before its acquisition by Cisco. He has a love-hate relationship with Rust, but it’s mostly love these days.
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Feature flags are much more than on/off switches to hide in-progress features. They separate releases from your deployments. They allow you to slowly roll out features to your user base. They give you access to easy A/B testing. Join Steve and Allen as they talk about the impressive capabilities of AWS AppConfig, a managed service that controls your feature flags and powers many of the AWS services. The two go over the types of feature flags, commonly seen anti-patterns, and how to implement them in your code.
About Steve
Steve is Principal Product Manager for AWS AppConfig, which is a feature flagging service that helps engineers move faster and more safely. His career has covered engineering and product management leadership roles at AWS, Coca-Cola, LivingSocial, and AOL, and has been using dynamic configuration to make things move faster for over a decade. He lives in the Northern Virginia area with his wife, kids, and two dogs.
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Are you cloud certified? In this episode of the Ready, Set, Cloud podcast Ro Ndimofor stands his ground on a hard-hitting stance against certifications. Enjoy the classic debate of "practice vs theory" as Ro and Allen discuss alternatives to certifications and if there really is a place for them in your career.
About Ro
Ro is a software developer and an AWS Serverless Hero who loves creating technical content. Be it on his blog or on his current project, EduCloud Academy, Ro is determined to help educate others and push for a stronger serverless community. EduCloud Academy is a Serverless learning platform with a strong focus on “Learning by Doing”.
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Java is notorious for slow cold starts in Lambda. But why? What can you do to make them faster? Is it time to ditch Python and make your way to the JVM? Join Vadym and Allen as they talk about Java's journey in serverless and explore some of the optimization techniques developers use to mitigate cold starts like Snap Start, priming, and using GraalVM.
About Vadym
Vadym Kazulkin is Head of Development at ip.labs GmbH, a 100% subsidiary of the FUJIFLM Group, based in Bonn. ip.labs is the world's leading white label e-commerce software imaging company. Vadym has been involved with the Java ecosystem for over twenty years. His focus and interests currently include the design and implementation of highly scalable and available applications, Serverless and AWS Cloud. Vadym is the co-organizer of the Java User Group Bonn meetup and AWS Community Builder in the Serverless category. He's also a frequent speaker at various Meetups and conferences.
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Have you ever wondered how MidJourney or ChatGPT work? Generative AI has taken the world by storm with millions of adopters using it daily. But how does it work? How does it go from a question you type in a dialog box to a meaningful answer or perfectly drawn image on screen? Join Matt and Allen as they discuss how completion models work, explain the differences between Generative AI and "regular" AI, and dive into the possibilities of the not-too-distant future.
About Matt
Matt is a software developer at Aleios, creator of Orion Tools, maintainer at Quivr, and AWS Community Builder. He loves open-source, serverless, and Generative AI. He also publishes a newsletter, Building with GenAI, where he shares the learnings and news from his projects.
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Many people say DevOps is dead with the introduction of serverless. Responsibilities change from infrastructure management to platform engineering. But what happens when you throw generative AI into the mix? How does this shake up what we now know as DevOps and what does it hold for the future? Is DevOps going to die? Omkar and Allen talk about the human aspect of DevOps and debate if this will still be something we're practicing in 5 years.
About Omkar
Omkar Kadam is a Lead DevOps Engineer at Cactus Communications, an AWS Community Builder, and a passionate problem solver with exceptional Solution Architecture skills. With a knack for simplifying complex concepts, Omkar's expertise in AWS/Cloud Computing allows him to deliver innovative and scalable solutions.
In addition to his technical prowess, Omkar has a passion for mentoring others. He has been a mentor for the prestigious UNESCO India Africa Hackathon, an international event aimed at strengthening the bonds between India and African nations and solving real-life problems via technology. Through mentoring, Omkar has helped aspiring developers and technologists reach their full potential.
He's also currently building something cool with Generative AI (checkout buildspace.so & Nights & weekends). And also won an AI Hackathon (organized by AWS Community Builders) for his project AWS Cost Advisor.
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