Meet the latest AWS Heroes

Bhuvaneswari Subramani
Bengaluru, India
DevTools Hero
@installjournal

A Community Hero since 2019, Bhuvaneswari is Director Engineering Operations at Infor, and a specialist in Cloud Computing, DevOps, and Performance Testing. A 20-year veteran of the tech industry, she’s also a community leader of Bengaluru’s AWS User Group, a regular speaker at AWS industry events, and a guest lecturer at engineering colleges across India.

Jared Short
Washington DC, USA
DevTools Hero
@ShortJared

An engineer at Stedi, Jared spends his days working with AWS CDK and other toolsets, crafting tools that make being an AWS developer easier and more enjoyable. Jared’s career has been steeped in serverless revolution, having previously worked as a senior architect and director of innovation at Trek10, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, and as Head of Developer Experience at Serverless, Inc. As well as co-hosting the Think FaaS Podcast, Jared also contributes to various blogs about emerging approaches and AWS services and is a regular speaker at tech events.

Matt Coulter
Belfast, Northern Ireland
DevTools Hero
@NIDeveloper

A Technical Architect for Liberty IT in Belfast, Matt specializes in developing environments that empower teams to deliver business value fast using well-architected serverless-first solutions. Matt contributes to the AWS community by maintaining and advocating CDK Patterns. CDK Patterns is an open-source collection of serverless architecture patterns built using AWS CDK and aligned with the AWS Well Architected Framework. He’s also the founder of CDK Day; the first community-driven global conference for all things CDK which attracted more than a thousand people for its first-ever outing! He’s also a regular speaker at tech events and conferences, where he shares his expertise on CDK and Serverless.

Paul Duvall
Washington DC, USA
DevTools Hero
@PaulDuvall

Co-founder and former CTO of Stelligent, Paul is also an author and has created many great works on development such as Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk, Continuous Compliance on AWS, Continuous Encryption on AWS, and Continuous Security on AWS. A passionate user of and advocate for AWS Developer Tools, Paul also hosted the DevOps on AWS Radio podcast for over three years.

Sebastian Korfmann
Hamburg, Germany
DevTools Hero
@cdkweekly

Sebastian is an entrepreneurial Software Engineer whose current focus lies in Cloud Tooling, Infrastructure as Code, and the world of the Cloud Development Kit (CDK). He’s also a key contributor to the CDK for Terraform project; Sebastian’s work enables users to define infrastructure using TypeScript, Python, and Java. A pillar of the CDK community, Sebastian co-founded cdk.dev, a community-driven hub for all things CDK, and also produces a weekly newsletter that keeps tabs on the blossoming CDK ecosystem.

Steve Gordon
East Sussex, United Kingdom
DevTools Hero
@stevejgordon

Steve Gordon is a Pluralsight author, senior engineer, and 16-year veteran of the .NET world. Highly experienced with using AWS as a platform for running .NET microservices, Steve shares his know-how regularly via blogs, and though .NET South East, a Brighton-based meetup group which Steve also founded.

Thorsten Höger
Stuttgart, Germany
DevTools Hero
@hoegertn

Thorsten Höger is CEO and cloud consultant at Taimos. He’s also a developer focused on optimizing development processes and using automation to create efficient deployment pipelines for all types of customers. An open-source software superfan, Thorsten maintains and contributes to many GitHub projects and maintains the Jenkins AWS Pipeline plugin. He’s also one of the top three non-AWS contributors to AWS CDK!

Ahmed Samir
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Community Hero
@AwsBelaraby

Ahmed is an n AWS- and Kubernetes-certified Cloud Architect and mentor who’s been in the IT space for over a decade. As the leader of Riyadh’s AWS, Amazon SageMaker, and Kubernetes meetups, Ahmed has organized and delivered over 40 events.

Anas Khattar
Beirut, Lebanon
Community Hero
@anaskhattar

Co-founder of Digico Solutions, Anas founded the AWS User Group Lebanon in 2018, growing the group to more than 1,000 members. A blogger and regular speaker at tech conferences, Anas also organized AWS Community Day MENA, which hosted 27 speakers over two days.

Chris Gong
New York, USA
Community Hero
@Flopperam

Chris is a fervent knowledge-sharer, using his YouTube channel to impart his expertise on how cloud services can be applied in game development. His primary focus is AWS Game Tech and Unreal Engine, honing in on the multiplayer and networking aspects of game development.

Damian Olguin
Cordoba, Argentina
Community Hero
@enlink

A tech entrepreneur and founder of AWS APN Partner Teracloud, Damian is also a community leader, co-organizer of AWS User Group Cordoba, and co-host of Twitch show #DeepFridays. He’s also a frequent speaker and has appeared at AWS Community Day Buenos Aires 2019, AWS re:Invent 2019, and AWS Community Day LATAM 2020.

Denis Bauer
Sydney, Australia
Data Hero
@allPowerde

A Principal Research Scientist at Australia’s government research agency (CSIRO), Denis is the creator of open-source products like VariantSpark, the first AWS Marketplace health product from a public sector organization. Denis is dedicated to facilitating the digital transformation of the health and life-science sector through open source technology, keynote presentations, and collaboration.

Denis Dyack
St. Catharines, Canada
Community Hero
@Denis_Dyack

Denis is the Founder and CEO of Apocalypse Studios, a video game industry veteran, and an evangelizes for using a cloud-first approach in game development. A long-time speaker at games conferences and AWS community groups, Denis is an advocate for building on Amazon Lumberyard and migrating game development pipelines to AWS.

Emrah Şamdan
Ankara, Turkey
Serverless Hero
@emrahsamdan

Emrah is the VP of Products at Thundra and a local community organizer for AWS Community Day Turkey, ServerlessDays Istanbul, and bi-weekly meetups at Cloud and Serverless Turkey. A frequent blogger on all things serverless and cloud-native microservices, earlier this year, Emrah co-organized the quarterly held ServerlessDays Virtual to help grow and connect the global serverless community during the pandemic.

Franck Pachot
Lausanne, Switzerland
Data Hero
@FranckPachot

A Principal Consultant and Database Evangelist at AWS Select Partner dbi services, Franck is a database fanatic with two decades of experience in development, data modeling, infrastructure, and DBA tasks. A recognized expert in both Oracle and AWS databases, he’s also an AWS Academy educator for Powercoders, a blogger, a podcaster, and a regular contributor to talks and conferences in the data community.

Hiroko Nishimura
Washington DC, USA
Community Hero
@hirokonishimura

Hiro is the founder of AWS Newbies and Cloud Newbies and is dedicated to helping people with non-traditional technical backgrounds begin their AWS journeys. Herself a “career switcher,” Hiro has been empowering people to build their cloud careers by breaking down computing jargon and putting her degrees in Special Education to good use by creating AWS courses for beginners.

Read Hiro’s blog on how to pass the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Exam.

Juliano Cristian
Santa Catarina, Brazil
Community Hero
@jucristian

CEO of Game Business Accelerator Academy and co-founder of Game Developers SC, Juliano is a key figure in the AWS Game Tech community. He organizes the AWS Game Tech Lumberyard User Group in Florianópolis, Brazil, and also guest lectures at over 90 educational institutions across Brazil, where he teaches students about cloud computing and AWS Game Tech services.

Jungyoul Yu
Seoul, Korea
Machine Learning Hero
GitHub

A DevOps Engineer Danggeun Market, Jungyoul is also a leader of the AWS DeepRacer Group and was a finalist in the AWS DeepRacer League at AWS Summit Seoul and AWS re:Invent 2019. Despite having no previous ML experience, Jungyoul used AWS DeepRacer to learn techniques and was soon sharing his expertise with the AWS DeepRacer Community through User Groups, meetups, and blog posts.

Juv Chan
Singapore
Machine Learning Hero
@juvchan

Juv is an AI automation engineer at UBS, the AWS DeepRacer League Singapore Summit 2019 champion, and a re:Invent Championship Cup 2019 finalist. Heavily involved in sharing knowledge in the DeepRacer and ML community, Juv is a writer for both Towards Data Science and Towards AI platforms and the lead organizer for the 2020 AWS DeepRacer Beginner Challenge global virtual community race.

Lukonde Mwila
Johannesburg, South Africa
Container Hero
@LuKE9ine

A three-time AWS certified Senior Software Engineer at Entelect, Lukonde is passionate about sharing knowledge on containerization and serverless technologies through speaking at meetups and tech conferences, as well as authoring technical articles on Medium. He’s also an advocate for open source, and regularly contributes to projects on GitHub.

Magdalena Zawada
Rybnik, Poland
Community Hero
LinkedIn

Magdalena is Director of Strategy and Expansion at LCloud Ltd, and has worked with AWS technology since 2013. A co-organizer of AWS UG Warsaw meetups, she also orchestrates events to help people prepare for AWS Cloud Practitioner Certifications. In 2019 Magdalena participated in the AWS re:Invent Community Leader “We Power Tech” Diversity Grant in Las Vegas.

Nick Walter
Lincoln, USA
Data Hero
LinkedIn

Boasting over 15 years of IT experience and numerous certifications in AWS, VMware, and Oracle, Nick is a fervent evangelist for data management solutions on AWS. Nick shares his data knowledge through blogging, hosting webinars, and presenting at conferences.

Renato Losio
Berlin, Germany
Data Hero
LinkedIn

A seven-time AWS certified Principal Cloud Architect at Funambol, Renato has been working with AWS technologies since 2011. Renato can often be found speaking at international events like DevOps Pro Europe, DevOpsConf Russia, All Day DevOps, Codemotion, and Percona Live. He also shares his know-how through technical writing; Renato is an editor at InfoQ and writes about database-related topics like Amazon RDS Proxy, Amazon RDS, and Amazon Aurora on his blog.

Tomasz Lakomy
Poznan, Poland
Community Hero
@tlakomy

An AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Senior Frontend Engineer at OLX Group, and egghead.io instructor, Tomasz is dedicated to sharing what he’s learned with others. The author of multiple courses on serverless technologies—including Build an App with the AWS Cloud Development Kit and Learn AWS Lambda from Scratch—he’s also an active blogger and contributor to The Practical Dev community.

Angela Timofte

Copenhagen, Denmark | Serverless Hero | @AngelaTimofte

A Data Platform Manager at Trustpilot with a background in legacy migrations and helping businesses take advantage of cloud technologies like serverless apps and event-driven architecture, Angela is fervent about leading by example and empowering others to build their own tech skills. As part of this drive to coach others, Angela is a co-organizer of the Copenhagen AWS User Group, and regularly imparts her serverless wisdom at events like AWS Summits, AWS Community Days, and ServerlessDays.

Avi Keinan

Tel Aviv, Israel | Community Hero | youtube.com/IsraelClouds

Community Hero Avi is Senior Cloud Engineer at AWS Partner DoIT International, where he focusses on infrastructure, serverless, and security solutions. Both in his work life and in his spare time, Avi loves to help people solve challenging problems, and is an active member of many online AWS forums. He also uses his multi-certified cloud brain to help others offline too, and regularly speaks at tech meetups and conferences.

Hirokazu Hatano

Tokyo, Japan | Community Hero | @tcsh

A true AWS Community Hero, Hirokazu has been a pillar of Japan’s AWS scene for many years. In 2014, he founded the Japan AWS User Group CLI chapter, and has hosted 165 events to date, reaching more than 4,000 people. Alongside organizing six additional JAWS-UG chapters, Hirokazu also successfully kept his user group going under challenging circumstances this year, taking the meetup from in-person to online and attracting more than 1,100 attendees across 12 events so far!

Ian McKay

Sydney, Australia | Community Hero | @iann0036

Ian is Cloud Lead at Kablamo, and the creator of the “Former2” and “Console Recorder for AWS” projects, helping developers author Infrastructure as Code templates from existing resources. A passionate open-source enthusiast, Ian shares his expertise in automation and tooling at events, on podcasts, and on his AWS blog.

Jacopo Nardiello

Milan, Italy | Container Hero | @jnardiello

CEO and Founder at SIGHUP, Jacopo is an automation-obsessed, machine-taming, Kubernetes super-fan. He’s also an ambassador for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and regular speaker at events both worldwide and in his local Italian cloud community, where he runs the Kubernetes & Cloud Native Milano meetup.

Jérémie Rodon

Paris, France | Community Hero | @JeremieRodon

Jérémie has as many AWS certifications as cats have lives. An AWS Cloud Architect at AWS Premier Consulting Partner Devoteam Revolve, he’s an open-source fan and is passionate about automation and scripting. He’s spoken and written about subjects like AWS KMS and quantum, as well as contributing to the development of multi-threaded Python applications and a One Time Password tool that streamlines multiple OTP management when working with multiple AWS Accounts.

Kittaya (Tak) Niennattrakul

Bangkok, Thailand |Community Hero | medium.com/aws-user-groupBlog

As a Product Manager and Assistant Managing Director at Dailitech, Tak works with development teams to create products using AWS; something she is massively passionate about. The only thing Tak loves more than coding on AWS is helping others understand and utilize cloud technology. A leader of the 8,000-member strong AWS User Group Thailand since 2014, she’s committed to finding fun and innovative ways to explain AWS services to both tech professionals and cloud novices alike. Tak is a leader of the AWS Asian Women’s Association.

Konstantinos Siaterlis

Athens, Greece | Machine Learning Hero | @siaterliskonsta

In his role as Head of Data Engineering Orfium, Konstantinos focusses on the adoption of AWS services, developing machine learning-powered data services, and implementing new data infrastructure. He’s also the co-organizer of AWS User Group Greece, and blogs about data science and AWS for TheLastDev.

Kyle Bai

Taichung City, Taiwan | Container Hero | @k2r2bai

By day, Kyle is a Site Reliability Engineer at MaiCoin, where he specializes in optimizing the performance and security of containerized apps. But he’s also a dedicated open-source project author, passionate about cloud-native infrastructure. An active member of the Cloud Native Taiwan User Group since 2017, Kyle is now a co-organizer, and regularly delivers talks at events like AWS re:Invent re:Cap Taipei, AWS Summit Taipei, AWS Developer Year-end Meetup Taipei, and AWS Taiwan User Group.

Linghui Gong

Shanghai, China | Community Hero | @danielglh

One of China’s OG AWS users, Linghui is VP of Engineering at SaaS startup Strikingly, Inc. He lead on evolving their architecture on AWS, which helped Strikingly fast-track its development. Linghui has a wealth of experience with all kinds of AWS products; this knowledge has helped build the company’s ability to deliver its services. He spoke about this success at AWS re:Invent 2018 and has twice presented at AWS Summit Beijing.

Luca Bianchi

Milan, Italy | Serverless Hero | @bianchiluca

Serverless Hero Luca is CTO at AWS ISV Neosperience, where he has taken a serverless-first approach to developing cloud solutions. Luca has worked with AWS for a decade, and in that time he’s built a whole host of products that support apps in the big data, IoT, and machine learning spaces. A passionate and always helpful member of the serverless community, Luca authors blogs on Medium on the subject, as well as appearing regularly at user groups and events. He’s also the co-founder of Serverless Meetup Italy and co-organizer of ServerlessDays Milano and ServerlessDays Italy.

Matthieu Napoli

Lyon, France | Serverless Hero | @matthieunapoli

Matthieu is a Software Engineer who’s dedicated to making serverless technology available to everyone. As part of his commitment to democratizing serverless, he spends a lot of time maintaining open-source projects like Bref, a framework which helps users develop serverless PHP apps on AWS. Matthieu also shares his knowledge through his monthly serverless newsletter, speaks at conferences, creates online courses, and trains teams on the benefits of using serverless.

Mike Chambers

Brisbane, Australia | Machine Learning Hero | @mikegchambers

Mike is an independent trainer who spends his time helping others get to grips with AWS and machine learning. One of the first AWS certified professionals in the world, Mike has disseminated his cloud know-how to more than a quarter of a million students! A prominent advocate for AWS machine learning services, Mike shares his passion for the subject at user groups, AWS Meetups, and events around the world, and creates educational social media content that often features Lego and/or robots. What’s not to like?

Noah Gift

Raleigh-Durham, USA | Machine Learning Hero | noahgift.com

Noah is the founder of Pragmatic A.I. Labs, a globetrotting university lecturer, an accomplished technical author, and a Machine Learning evangelist. As well as lecturing on cloud computing at top universities, he also designs graduate machine learning, MLOps, A.I., and data science courses, as well as providing consultation on machine learning and cloud architecture for AWS. His many books include Pragmatic AI, Python for DevOps, and Cloud Computing for Data Analysis.

Olalekan Elesin

Berlin, Germany | Machine Learning Hero | @elesinOlalekan

Olalekan is aData Platform Tech Lead at HRS Group, where he works to deliver AWS data solutions. A born engineer, he loves solving problems, especially using tools like AWS SageMaker. He also shares his knowledge with the world through regular talks and blog posts—he even coined a new term: CD4AutoML, short for Continuous Delivery for AutoML!

Peter Hanssens

Sydney, Australia | Serverless Hero | @petehanssens

Peter is a Founder and Solutions Architect at Cloud Shuttle, and a huge part of the Sydney serverless community. Over the past three years, he’s helped to develop data engineering societies in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane, as part of his drive to help those in the cloud space learn from each other and develop their careers. Peter also organized Australia’s first-ever ServerlessDays in 2019, and later ran AWS Serverless Community Day ANZ, ServerlessDays ANZ, and DataEngBytes.

Ruofei Ma

Beijing, China | Container Hero | github.com/malphi

Ruofei is a Principal Software Engineer for FreeWheel Inc. In this role, he’s responsible for developing cloud-native applications using AWS container services like Amazon EKS and AWS App Mesh. He’s also an author, having published Istio in Practice in 2019, and is a lecturer for China’s biggest IT knowledge-sharing platform. He enthusiastically advocates for mesh technologies in the tech community, and is a committee member of the largest service mesh community in China, and regularly shares his best practices via blog posts.

Sheen Brisals

London, UK | Serverless Hero | @sheenbrisals

Of this new batch of Heroes, Serverless Hero Sheen might be able to lay claim to having the coolest job as a Senior Engineering Manager at The LEGO Group. Having started his engineering career almost 30 years ago, Sheen has built a wealth of knowledge that he loves to keep up-to-date and share with others. As part of his role at The LEGO Group, Sheen also guides and coaches fellow engineers and helps with career development. He’s also a major player in the global serverless community, and can often be spotted delivering talks at events, or sharing serverless tips and adoption strategies through his Medium blog.

Sridevi Murugayen

Chennai, India | Data Hero | @Sridevijms21

Sridevi is a Data Hero and developer with more than 16 years of IT experience. As a Spark and AWS certified Senior Cloud Architect at Agilisium Consulting, she focuses on delivering big data and analytics solutions to help customers do more with their data. She’s also an active part of Chennai’s AWS community, co-organizing User Groups, hosting and delivering Developer Days and Meetups, and speaking at a huge range of events on all things AWS Analytics. Sridevi is a huge advocate for diversity and inclusion, and is passionate about empowering female technologists to build successful careers in AWS. In recognition of this critical work, she was selected to receive an AWS re:Invent Community Leader Diversity Grant in 2019.

Stéphane Maarek

Lisbon, Portugal | Data Hero | @StephaneMaarek

Stéphane is a 9x AWS Certified Solutions Architect and Developer Associate who is dedicated to helping others learn AWS skills through his extensive online courses. (Eagled-eyed blog readers might recognize him from our AWS training resources post!) His 31 AWS courses are among the bestselling on Udemy; he’s helped hundreds of thousands of budding AWS users and professionals land their own AWS certifications and expand their cloud knowledge. As well as being an evangelist for AWS learning and development, Stéphane is also passionate about Apache Kafka, and recently joined forces with AWS to deliver a comprehensive course on Amazon MSK.

Tom McLaughlin

Boston, USA | Serverless Hero | @tmclaughbos

Cloud infrastructure and operations engineer. Blogger. Author. Cat dad. Tom is all of these things. He’s also an early tech adopter and serverless specialist who has recently been focussing on mentoring teams new to AWS, and helping them to get to grips with all the opportunities and benefits the platform can bring. Check out his excellent thread about his AWS Hero journey 👇🏻

Philippe Abdoulaye

Raleigh, USA | Community Hero | @PhilAbdoulaye

The founder of AWS consultancy ITaaSNow and a specialist in helping businesses leverage the cloud, Philippe works to guide companies through the transformation of their IT infrastructure using AWS. He’s even developed new architecture frameworks to speed up AWS infrastructure design and implementation. An accomplished speaker, Philippe is also the author of seven books and more than 100 articles on AWS, DevOps, and digital transformation.

Jayesh Ahire

Pune, India | Machine Learning Hero | @Jayesh_Ahire1

Jayesh is a Machine Learner researcher and developer, and a hugely active member of the AWS community. The leader of no less than four tech user groups, he’s a regular speaker at conferences and meet-ups and has written countless blogs and books on neural networks, reinforcement learning, blockchain, and simulation.

Parthasarathi Balasubramanian

Chennai, India | Community Hero | @bs_partha

An AWS user since 2013, Partha is a Cloud Solution Architect at 8K Miles and a holder of both the AWS Certified Solution Architect Professional and Certified Security Specialty certifications. Two years ago, he founded AWS User Group Chennai, which has since grown to almost 3,000 active members, and organizes many other user groups and meet-ups both on and offline.

Matthew Bonig

Denver, USA | Data Hero | @mattbonig

Specializing in boosting productivity and improving the software lifecycle with serverless, Matthew is a consultant at Defiance Digital. An expert in DynamoDB, AWS Cloud Development Kit, AWS API Gateway, and AWS Lambda, Matthew is a regular face at data and tech events and led several official DynamoDB builder’s sessions at last year’s re:Invent.

Veliswa Boya

Johannesburg, South Africa | Community Hero | @Vel12171

Meet Africa’s first-ever female AWS Hero. A two-time certified AWS Cloud Engineer, Veliswa works with developer teams to create cloud migration strategies and architecture designs for businesses in the Financial Services sector. A member of the Indoni Developers, a platform for African women working in tech, Veliswa is passionate about supporting those who are taking their first steps into the world of AWS. She regularly shares her knowledge and experiences through her work as a mentor, blogger, and speaker at events such as the first-ever AWS Community Day Cape Town.

Andrew Brown

Toronto, Canada | Community Hero | @andrewbrown

As the co-founder of ExamPro, Andrew Brown works to help budding AWS professionals pass their certification exams with flying colors. Committed to making cloud knowledge accessible, he publishes free and ad-free training video courses on freeCodeCamp and also mentors people looking to kick start their careers in the cloud space. A top author for DEV, Andrew is also a regular at AWS Toronto User Group events.

Kyuhyun Byun

Seoul, Korea | Serverless Hero | novemberde.github.io

The leader of the AWSKRUG Serverless Group and a Software Engineer, Kyuhyun is a serverless specialist who enjoys using tools like AWS Lambda and AWS Glue to build real-time services and data pipelines. He’s appeared at several tech conferences and regularly leads talks and hands-on labs at local user groups.

Elliott Cordo

Berkeley Heights, USA | Data Hero | linkedin.com

An expert in all things data-related, Elliott is dedicated to helping businesses turn raw data into powerful insights. Utilizing the AWS platform, he’s built almost a dozen cloud-based data solutions for companies of all shapes and sizes. His work at Equinox Fitness, which saw him create a complete data infrastructure on AWS, has become an impressive case study and has appeared on both AWS and Equinox’s blogs and wash the subject of presentations at re:Invent.

Sandip Das

Kolkata, India | Container Hero | @techie_sandy

Sandip is a Senior Cloud Solutions Architect and DevOps Engineer at Gryphon Online Safety, among others, where he focuses on creating innovative solutions using AWS. An experienced container pro, Sandip specializes in developing and optimizing containerized solutions using AWS containerization tools like ECS, EKS, and Fargate. A fountain of knowledge and resource for the container community, he blogs about AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, programming and more, as well as creating video tutorials on YouTube to help others get to grips with containerization.

Rustem Feyzkhanov

San Jose, USA | Machine Learning Hero | ryfeus.io

As a Machine Learning Engineer at Instrumental, Rustem specializes in developing smart analytical models for the manufacturing sector. He’s authored a number of online courses on deep learning and is the creator of many popular Github repositories on using AWS for deep learning apps.

Hiromi Ito

Osaka, Japan | Community Hero | @hiro_baila

Currently Customer Marketing Manager at DigitalCube, Hiromi is a pillar of Japan’s AWS community. As well as helping run the Japanese AWS User Group, she’s also been instrumental in the formation of a women’s AWS group, and in supporting regional community groups. Last year, she created AWS Asian Women’s Association which hosts events and online meetups across Asia, and was the recipient of the 2019 AWS re:Invent Community Leader Diversity Grant.

Zamira Jaupaj

Amsterdam, The Netherlands | Community Hero | @zamirajaupaj

As a Solution Architect at Mobiquity, Zamira helps businesses implement complex AWS solutions, including containers, serverless, and data analytics, and gets them started on the road to digital transformation. She’s also the founder of AWS Meetup Albania and the co-organizer of AWS Meetup Netherlands, as well as a technical author and regular speaker at global tech events.

Heewon Jeon

Seoul, Korea | Machine Learning Hero | @gogamza

Heewon Jeon is an Applied Scientist at SK Telecom, and an active member of the Distributed Machine Learning Community, through which he contributes to GluonNLP and develops NLP open source projects in his spare time. He’s worked on machine learning projects in partnership with AWS internal teams, and is also an author, contributing many articles on model training and distribution for the AWS Korea blog.

Hyunmin Kim

Seoul, Korea | Community Hero | linkedin.com

As Manager of Megazone Cloud’s Commercial Technology Center Solutions Architect team, Hyunmin Kim has spent the past three years working with businesses to create new experiences using AWS. A leading member of the Gangnam tech community, he helps organize and presents at the AWSKRUG Gangnam and the AWSKRUG Container Groups.

Pascal Martin

Lyon, France | Container Hero | @pascal_martin

Container expert Pascal is a DevOps Lead at Bedrock, where his work has seen him move an entire video streaming platform to AWS using Kubernetes containers. Pascal is passionate about sharing knowledge and regularly writes about his experiences on his blog. He’s also hosted talks on resiliency, cloud, and containerization at many tech conferences across Europe.

Kohei Matsushita

Tokyo, Japan | IoT Hero | @ma2shita

An expert on all things IoT, Kohei is a leader in the space; as Technology Evangelist at SORACOM, he produces and delivers over 140 seminars and training sessions across Japan every year. His videos, blogs, and books on IoT technology are widely referenced in the IoT community, and he’s also an active participant in the Japan AWS User Group.

Serkan Özal

Istanbul, Turkey | Serverless Hero | @serkan_ozal

Serkan is the CTO and founder of serverless-centric security and monitoring solution Thundra. A regular blogger and speaker, he often publishes his work as open source tools and libraries to help others, and can also be found moderating at serverless workshops.

Jayaraman Palaniappan

Orange County, USA | Data Hero | @JayPalaniappan

Jayaraman is Head of Cloud Practice at Agilisium, where he focuses on building data analytics solutions for customers using AWS big data services. He’s well known for conducting webinars, immersion days, and community days to spread the word about the benefits of AWS data tools both internally at Agilisium and independently.

Marcelo Palladino

São Paulo, Brazil | Community Hero | @mfpalladino

A six-time AWS certified professional, Marcelo is a Senior Software Engineer at Hi Platform and specializes in using his two decades IT experience to deliver cloud-based systems for customers. As a regular speaker and co-organizer of the AWS User Group São Paulo and AWS Community Day Brazil, Marcelo is dedicated to positively impacting his community by sharing his cloud knowledge.

Rajarajan Pudupatti

Newport, USA | Container Hero | linkedin.com

In his role as Director of Cloud Platform architecture at Fidelity Investments, Rajarajan works toward the development of next-gen model cloud-native platforms on AmazonEKS to help enterprises run their mission-critical workloads. A previous speaker at KubeCon, he’s also a GitHub enthusiast and has been pivotal in helping get various open-source projects up to production standard.

Cosmin Sanda

Copenhagen, Denmark | Machine Learning Hero | cosminsanda.com

Cosmin is passionate about combining data engineering with data science to create scalable, resilient data tools. With his tutorials, best practices, and step-by-step guides to delivering working applications, Cosmin is dedicated to sharing valuable experience and information with the machine learning community. He also runs the Copenhagen Apache MXNet and provides support to others seeking to do more with data.

Bruce Sun

Hangzhou, China | Community Hero | @Bruce51938973

As the Hybrid Cloud Team Leader of NetEase Games, Bruce utilizes AWS network services such as VPC, Direct Connect, and Global Accelerator to deliver a complex hybrid network architecture that serves the company’s global gaming services. Committed to sharing his experiences helping his company innovate faster, Bruce has participated in events like re:Invent and AWS Game Tech Days.

Amy Tseng

Washington D.C., USA | Data Hero | linkedin.com

A specialist in data warehousing and analytics, Amy is a Data Engineering Manager at Fannie Mae. She has previously delivered sessions on data warehousing at re:Invent and AWS Public Sector Summit, and is passionate about exploring new developments in technology. An advocate for women in tech, Amy also regularly presents at local meet-ups for Women in Technology to help encourage more female professionals to get into the big data space.

Rehan van der Merwe

Pretoria, South Africa | Community Hero | @der_rehan

A three-time AWS certified Developer, Architect and all-round AWS enthusiast, Rehan specializes in serverless solutions, and is passionate about architecting big data and microservices. A keen blogger and regular go-to for help on the AWS slack channels, Rehan is always ready and willing to share his knowledge with others in the AWS space.

Artem Yushev

Munich, Germany | IoT Hero | linkedin.com

Artem is a Staff Application Engineer at Infineon’s Digital Security Solutions division, where he evangelizes open source software and shares his zeal for embedded security and IoT. He primarily concentrates on FreeRTOS and hardware security usage in FreeRTOS and with AWS IoT, and is devoted to ensuring security best practices are accessible to everyone.

Stephen Borsay

Portland, OR | Website

An electronic hobbyist who loves nothing more than sharing his enthusiasm with other IoT aficionados, Stephen is well-known for democratizing IoT and embedded systems, working to make the technology understandable and accessible to people of all skill levels. His time as an IoT Engineer has seen Stephen tackling the development of tech such as microcontroller units and field-programmable gate arrays. Today, he mostly focuses on AWS IoT and device-to-cloud integration projects.

Stephen is a prolific knowledge-sharer, authoring community IoT projects and creating and publishing online learning content and tutorials on platforms like YouTube, Udemy, and Hackster.io. His learning materials are essential reading for professional developers, those looking to use AWS IoT to create business solutions and for budding, entry-level IoT enthusiasts.

As if that wasn’t enough, Stephen is also the founder of the Digital Design meetup group, which hosts regular meetings to deliver hands-on IoT training in Portland. Keep your eyes peeled for Stephen’s new course, Serverless IoT on AWS, which is due for release later this month!

Hein Tibosch

Bali | LinkedIn

Independent Embedded Software Developer Hein is a talented software developer specializing in embedded applications. He also has a knack for developing web-connected audio devices. This IoT wizard has more than 17 years’ experience in the field and is lauded for his contributions to the FreeRTOS community.

A fervent super-committer to the FreeRTOS project, Hein’s been using his wealth of technical know-how to help create solutions and share them with others for the past eight years, driving adoption and supporting the work of embedded developers in the process. Earlier in his career, Hein trained in cognitive science and AI before discovering his passion for embedded development. He got his start in the field of IoT working with Microprocessor Units and writing medical applications on Linux. He was later introduced to the world of MCUs on FreeRTOS.

Don Coleman

Phildephia, PA | @doncoleman

As Chief Innovation Officer at Philadelphia’s Chariot Solutions, Don builds software on the foundations of AWS services. Not only does Don work to reinvent existing technology and pave the way for the products of tomorrow, but he also uses his experience with IoT projects to share his expertise and help others employ AWS to solve their IoT challenges.

Don is a regular speaker at tech events and user groups, spreading his knowledge about technology like NFC, Bluetooth Low Energy, and LoRaWAN. An author and instructor, as well as an accomplished speaker, Don teaches IoT skills to graduates as part of NYU’s ITP program in Brooklyn and has co-written a number of books, including Beginning NFC and Make: Bluetooth.

Nathan Glover

Perth, Australia | @nathangloverAUS

Based in Perth, Western Australia, Nathan is a DevOps Consultant at Mechanical Rock. Throughout his time in the IoT space, Nathan has also worked as a Hardware Systems Designer and Embedded Developer, helping developers to get ideas to market faster by improving testing and deployment processes.

Nathan is a Cloud Native architecture nut, and regularly shares details of his successes and his lessons learned with fellow enthusiasts on his blog. Committed to removing obstacles to learning by showcasing practical examples of what can be done with cloud services, Nathan has published several online courses to help budding cloud pros get to grips with Amazon Alexa Skills and AWS IoT.

Nathan’s passion for all things cutting-edge tech is near-boundless: when he’s not writing about IoT or teaching others, he can be found building IoT-enabled toasters, developing embedded systems vehicle tracking, competing in online security events, and acting as Technical Director for his local animal shelter where he’s utilized AWS tools to improve form processing systems.