Face to face developer events have certainly been scarce this year during COVID-19. But it’s been great to see how many events have pivoted to an online edition, so we can keep learning by hearing about great stories whilst making new friends - even if virtually for now.
With that in mind, I’m excited to be the host of an awesome online event coming very soon - the AWS ANZ Community Day. Streaming live on twitch.tv/aws, the event will be spread over five days from November 9-13, 2020, between 11:00am to 3:00pm AEDT each day.
With five different core topics each day, we’ve got a fantastic agenda lined up, so there’s bound to be something valuable for everyone, including developers, startup business leaders, technical founders, engineers and architects.
Click here to see the agenda and register to attend!
Event highlights: from toddler bots and sports coaching to IoT sweet snacks!
The AWS Community Day Special Edition event is a virtual community-led series, showcasing and celebrating some of the great local developments happening around Australia and New Zealand, as we hear from community speakers, influencers and innovators. Our motto is “by the community, for the community”, so we’ll be covering topics that resonate most with you, including architectures, analytics, AI, Machine Learning, IoT, AR/VR, and more.
Here are just three of the interesting sessions we have planned:
One speaker will detail the AI bot they created using AWS tools, which interacts with their toddler, recognising the toy he is carrying and then playing YouTube videos about that toy. Apparently it’s been very helpful for working-from-home parents with active, super curious toddlers during COVID-19!
Another presenter will talk about creating a sentiment analysis sweet machine using AWS IoT. This session will cover how AWS IoT works, detailing the architecture of the sentiment analysis sweet machine, which provides different candies and lollies depending on your mood!
And here’s a fascinating look at the future of sports coaching. Another of our presenters will discuss how they used Machine Learning-based computer vision for edge devices to train, optimise and manage the models that power a cricket-based coaching tool.
Hmmm… I wonder if they could combine candy machine rewards with the cricket coaching? That’s the power of networking at Community Day events, you never know what connections you might make!
Benefits of getting involved in the AWS User Group community
My own journey to becoming an AWS Community Hero is one I’d recommend to anyone interested in this space. My background was as a data analyst, so I did not travel the traditional computer science path into cloud technologies.
To make the transition to cloud, I got into Serverless architectures as it seemed like the easiest and most natural pathway. After reading endless blogs, completing courses and getting as certified as possible, I realised there was something missing. And that was community connections, mentoring and learning from peers.
Being part of the AWS User Group Community will expose you to a variety of people, stories and information – and you’ll learn by osmosis. It really fast-tracks your skills development, just by hearing about what other data engineers are getting up to locally, in your own city and country. Not to mention the career opportunities and job opportunities that come with involvement with such community groups.
In Sydney, I started the Sydney Data Engineering meetup group, and more recently headed up the Sydney Serverless group. Now I collaborate with AWS as an AWS Serverless Hero, leading the AWS ANZ User Groups on Facebook and LinkedIn.
I’d definitely encourage anyone to join a Community User group, or even form a new one if you feel a specific niche is not being covered. Being part of an AWS Community User Group provides you with access to funding, sponsorship, free AWS credits and the ability to talk to absolute experts in their field - I can’t recommend getting involved highly enough.
Register now for AWS ANZ Community Day
Registration is now open! The AWS ANZ Community Day Special Edition is kicking off on November 9 through to November 13, 2020, between 11:00am to 3:00pm AEDT each day.
Register now and come along. You’ll learn how to run lean and scale fast to build your next big thing, and how to deploy your applications in highly available, scalable architectures.
I look forward to hosting you there.
