#102: Building AWS communities with Farrah Campbell
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Hi, welcome back to another episode of Real World Serverless. Today, I'm joined by Farah Campbell, who is a good friend of mine, and she's a woman behind the Heroes program and the Community Builders program. So Farah, you are the head of the Modern Compute Communities program. I guess, you know, shall we start by just talking about what is that and what does that consist of?

Yeah, well, hey, Jan. Thank you so much for having me. I'm definitely glad to join the show. But yeah, my name is Farah. So I have an amazing job where I get to work with the Amazon community. Specifically, my focus has been on containers, serverless,

the dev tooling and now you'll see some of the new, like the next gen developer experience, you know, services that we have been working on. So I'll also work on those. But really what my role is, is, you know, I help to grow and highlight, you know, maintain, you know, the community, you know, providing them resources, you know, amplifying their voices, connecting them to service teams to make sure that, you know, you all have the latest and greatest information and,

But really, I think there's like really two main functions of what I do. It's like gathering information from the AWS community to inform or go to market and product decisions, but also to help to nurture and build the community so that they can be successful in the communities that they are helping to manage or to engage or help to provide education.

Right. And one of the things that often get asked about, because I've been part of the Heroes program for a while, is just what is the Heroes program and how is it different from, say, the Community Builders program? And what's the process of how do you become a hero?

Okay, well, sure. I guess I can start with, for the heroes, there isn't a way to get started. It's not something that you can self-select into. It's not something that you can raise your hand and ask to be one. Really, to become an AWS hero, again, there's no set way to become one, but what I can recommend is that

you know, folks that are out there that are taking it upon themselves to learn, to grow, and then to share the information that they learn, you know, with others to try to help to unblock them. But, you know, it's really about helping other people. It's about, you know, being passionate, you know, about some, you know, about, you know, specific ecosystem and helping others. I think some people think that, you know, maybe it's like an objective task. So,

if I write 100 blog posts on AWS, then I'm going to be part of the become an AWS hero. And that's really not what it is. It's a secondary motion that happens after you're

people are out there helping others. I mean, I can think about how much content that you were writing at the early days of serverless, right? And all the talks and like code examples and answering questions online, you know, that was all to the benefit of the community, you know, and just trying to help to share information, you know, with what you had learned. And so really, I think it's, you know, it's, it's, if that's the end goal and the goal isn't, you know, about, you know,

You know, helping other people is you're probably doing it for the wrong reasons. And I don't know if that's helpful or not, but, you know, there really isn't, you know, like an objective task. It's, you know, I say, you know, if you're helping others and, you know, helping others to grow and I'm blocking people, you know, then, you know, hopefully you'll get noticed. But that shouldn't be the only thing that you're achieving, too.

Yeah, and that's very much what Danielle wrote in her recent blog post as well. She wrote something, a blog post, I think something like how to become an AWS hero, which I think when I read that title, I was a little bit worried until I read it. And the first thing she said was, you know, that's not the point. Becoming a hero is not the point. It's about helping others. Recognition will come if you are making a sound contribution to the community for the sake of the community and not just for, you know,

for yourself, people would recognize it and eventually that recognition would come.

Yeah, no, I know. I mean, I will be honest, like I was surprised when I became one, like, you know, we were we were heroes together. And I really had no idea how I became how I became one. And nobody even told me once I even, you know, once I became one, what I had actually done. But again, yeah, I think you're right. Like it is all about helping others, you know, and if you're doing it just for yourself, then it, you know, it's probably for the wrong reasons. But we also have the Community Builders Program, too. So that was launched in October 2020. And

And that's really a way to recognize other folks that are participating in the AWS community because there really is a high bar to become a hero. We wanted to provide opportunities to help to amplify others' voices and to provide more learning resources to be able to bring in their feedback as well. And you can apply for that program. Unfortunately, you can only apply once a year, and that's at the beginning of the year.

But if there's anybody listening to this right now, you know, get your name on that wait list. And, you know, always, you can always like ping myself or others in the community to kind of share what, you know, those folks have done, you know, to, to become a part of the, the, you know, the community builder program.

But, yeah, it is. I think that there's a lot more community builders, too. I think there's like 2,458 now and like 155 countries. And then we have 255 heroes in 55 countries. So quite a lot more community builders than there are heroes.

How long have you been one? Before, I think the Heroes program was just for communities. People that run community groups and things like that. And then I think in 2018, they started the new categories, the more specialized Heroes categories. And I was the first batch of the serverless Heroes.

I think me, Ben Cahill, and a few other people that's been, you know, Jeremy Daly, I think as well, you know, people that's been writing about AWS and serverless specifically for a while by then. So yeah, it's been there for a long time and I've really enjoyed the program, what it has done for us. And personally, as you know, for my career, it's been great, especially me working as an independent, you know, being able to say I'm an AWS hero, even though it's a program that recognizes the

community contribution not necessarily technical competence because I know a lot of people who are very technically competent they are not the heroes program because they you know they are contributing towards the company that they're working for but not so much maybe sharing publicly

But having said that, the program has given me a lot of insight and also a lot of authority in the field, but a lot of insights into what's going on within the different database teams. You particularly organized a lot of sessions that gives us the opportunity to see what's coming up from different services and also getting some feedback

And so that those has been really, really helpful. So maybe can we maybe share a little bit about what's happening behind the scenes on these programs in terms of, okay, why should I bother becoming a community builder? And what are the perks of the program?

Well, yeah, like, just like you said that it's been beneficial to you, you know, having your guys's feedback and being able to bring you in, you know, to bring your voice in early on, you know, product, product roadmaps. I mean, that's hugely beneficial to us as well, right? I mean, a lot of you folks are, you know, running different workloads, you know, things that maybe we just, we're not visiting and there's a lot of things with like edge cases. So, you know, being able to, to get feedback, you know, early on, on,

how we're shaping specific services is highly, I mean, it is such a huge benefit and a win to our teams. I think you even participated in a couple of the, like the UX perception studies, and kind of clicking around on the console and trying to tell us if this makes sense to you and what doesn't. But it's really a benefit to us too, is that to be able to get that feedback from folks that are using this day to day.

But I think, you know, for like, what are the benefits? And I think for both of the programs, you know, it's like recognition and visibility.

So there's a lot of, we're definitely watching and trying to find ways to share any type of content, share events that the community is working on internally. And sometimes that can lead to talks at the summits or talk some that we have a community track also at re:Invent.

You know, can bring visibility to open source projects that folks are maintaining, you know, also having that exclusive access and support, you know, so being able to come, you know, to somebody directly at AWS that can get you in touch, you know, with the service team to, you know, to get you that information or to kind of talk through whatever issues that, you know, you're having or.

There's also access to talking about what are different content ideas or finding ways to partner with other teams. I've even helped some of our community members to bring in specific service teams to their jobs and to have them come do a team event internally or training.

There's also, I think one of the biggest is like the networking opportunities, you know, you get to connect with other experts from all over the world. Right. So, like, you'll see that, you know, there's people that kind of come together globally that will create these projects. I think.

the one like Johannes and Danielle had worked on and a few other community builders was the speakers directory. And then you saw like Ralph and Luke last year working on the AWS newsfeed that they had done. I know there's a little bit of an issue with that for a second, but you do have somebody internally that you can get to right away to help have those things, to have issues get fixed

Fixed or just bring attention and awareness to them. Um, other benefits are, you know, um, invitations to exclusive events. Um, so, you know, having, um, you know, specific meetups where we'll bring in other internal teams, or just bring the community together at reinvent. Um, and we also have, you know, community lounges often at the summit. Um.

But I think, too, also, it's like another benefit is like, you know, you get like giving back to the community. So, you know, you have like meaningful impact, you know, on the AWS ecosystem, you know, by sharing knowledge, you know, mentoring and, you know, contributing, you know, your feedback. So like that actually, you know, helps to grow the entire ecosystem.

So I think those are probably the biggest that I see. But I think also being part of it, you now have friends from all over the world, right? You can reach out to someone. If you're going to Singapore, there's a hero there or there's a community member there. So just having a friend in different locations can, I know that's been a huge benefit for me. I never had that before.

Yeah, I guess one of the things that we haven't touched on is the fact that there are heroes and then I think there's community builders, Slack channels, and that's where you can also just engage with a lot of other people. That's part of the program. And I've had quite a few of the Alibaba teams ping me on those Slack channels when they want to get some feedback on

like stuff that's doing with Cognito or verify permissions or whatever. So it becomes a channel that the other teams within AWS is able to reach out to you and just, you know, directly communicate with you as well.

which I find that has been quite a nice thing. And for folks who are listening, who are not aware of what Farrow was referring to earlier about the problem that they had with 80% News site. So when the Luke was put together, the 80% News unofficial news site, there was a, I think they received some legal messaging about, oh, you know, you can't do this because this is not official. And then, you know,

Obviously, everyone was very sad when Luke had to turn it off. But then that's when the... I guess that's one thing that I think AWS has been really good at is just listening to the community feedback and actually acting pretty quickly. For the company, the size of AWS is pretty crazy how quickly they pivot. Another good example happened just, I guess, last couple of days. Someone wrote about he has got this bucket...

which is private, but then his bucket name happened to be just so unlucky, happened to be the name that some open source project was using as a placeholder. And then he found out that all the requests people are making, even though they're unauthorized, you still get charged for those against your own S3 bucket.

So just super, super unlucky. But then, you know, he wrote a blog post about it. There's a lot of people saying, okay, this doesn't seem fair. You know, we didn't do anything. We just happen to have a bucket that someone else is calling. We shouldn't get charged for that. And yeah,

And yeah, so it took maybe, I don't know, about 48 hours or less than that for Jeff Barr to basically chime in and say, yep, no, we agree. We looked at this. This is not fair. We shouldn't charge for unauthorized requests. We can look at how to fix this, even though it's something that's been there for the whole time.

I guess it's the first time someone actually got really unlucky enough to get hit by something like this. But the point is that AWS for a company of that size is really good at reacting to and responding to community feedback.

No, definitely. I was actually really like impressed to see that. And I didn't even know that could happen until I read that blog post. But even like with the issue before with I think it was like the reinvent, you know, the reinvent tracker was the thing with like Luke, you know, but like, you know, we can bring those things up internally. And then to have, you know, Werner even, you know, to like come back and, you know, thank Luke and Ralph for, you know, what they had done and, you know, apologize, you

you know, in a public forum, to me is like, it means something. And I like, I've actually, I often get pinged by service teams, you know, they'll see, like tweets, they'll see, you know, content that's written, and they want to know more. So like, they'll ask me, I think I've reached out to you a few times, you know, for some of the content. So like, people could like bring that feedback in.

And I've always asked, I mean, like, you know, they must have some like, you know, RSS feed where they're kind of tracking all those things because it's just so much content out there everywhere, you know, to be able to capture all of that. But, you know, I, that is one thing I really love about working at AWS is that we really do care about like our customers and our community. And we are listening, right? Like we are constantly listening and, you know, trying to do

you know, trying to do the right thing. But yeah, that was pretty cool to see Jeff like grab that within, you know, 48 hours. I was definitely surprised.

And you've been running, I guess, the communities for a long time, even back when you were at Stackery. I remember that's where you got really involved with a lot of the serverless communities activities. And so I guess, you know, you've been running communities for a while. And what have been some of the lessons you've learned about, you know, pros and cons? Well, I guess, do's and don'ts when it comes to trying to build a community?

Ah, let's see. I think some of it is just like, you know, making assumptions about what people want to do. You know what I mean? You kind of think you understand, you know, based on, you know, what you see online, you know, so I think taking time to really understand, you know, you know, what community members, how they're looking to participate, you know, what they're comfortable with, what they're not, you know, just under, you know, so understanding.

you don't just try to like inundate people with just requests right you would think you know sometimes i think we think that people love to speak and they want to be you know on stage but not everybody likes to you know do that part some people are more like i want to just manage and take care and contribute to these projects or i'd rather just write content i have no desire to you know to be on stage i think that is um i think also too you know um

you know, recognizing differences, right? Just because, you know, how I behave and speak, you know, here in the States is very, very different than, you know, in other ecosystems. And so, you know, just trying to, you know,

to do more listening, I think too is right. Like I do a lot of listening and trying to understand the different needs of different individuals and also different ecosystems because those can vary based on the work that people are trying to do. And then what else do I think? Some of the things that like kind of has been surprising.

I think that actually too, sometimes like you kind of like, I love the communities and like the heroes, obviously. But I don't think I sometimes you have to explain to other teams, like, you know, having to get their trust and have, you know, not everybody just trust people just because I do, you know, so having to, you know, to like earn, you know, internal trust and, you know, basically kind of share the reasons why and the benefits of working with the community that that doesn't necessarily come natural to, you know, everybody. Yeah.

So those are, I guess, a couple of them. Yeah.

Okay. And, uh, have you got some tips because obviously nowadays that there's more and more people are, you know, kind of building communities, uh, for the foot for, for their own communities, but also for their products, it becomes a more of a much more of the, I guess the, the, the, the way that companies kind of build the ecosystem around them. And, uh, you know, I've looked at things like SST, they've done really good job of building this cohort of, uh, of people that are really, really big fans of SST. Uh,

They're probably not so much of a fan of Dex's and some of his shitposting on social media, but clearly it's kind of working. Do you have some suggestions for in terms of, you know, if someone wants to or a company now today wants to build a developer community, what are some of the things that they should be looking at, you know, in terms of approaches, tools, whatever?

Yeah, I mean, like I would say, I mean, like I think there's like you break it down into like four steps. Well, there's probably more than four steps, but like the four that like stand out to me is like you really want to create an environment where people want to be, you know, so you need to make sure that there's some fun, you know, and also recognize that, you know, everybody is unique. So the more that you lead with, you know,

and, you know, kindness, decency, you know, empathy, um, the better off that the, the community, you know, that you're, you know, hoping to grow will be, um, you know, encouraging people to visit, participate, and then, you know, recognizing, um, you know, members for doing so. Um, uh,

let's see, like promoting the actions of the community to others. So, you know, making sure like I actually, you know, have every day, you know, I go through and look for, you know, content, you know, specifically if I'm tagged in it to make sure that, you know, I'm helping to share it more broadly, but also sharing internally just to, you know, bring more eyes and, you know, ears to the, you know, whatever the community is working on. And then, yeah,

I think the other one is like, you know, investing in the community members so they stay, right? Like I, you can't just, you know, start a community and not continue to participate actively. And so I think, you know, showing up and not just expecting people to come to you. So, you know, I'm, you know, I'm going over to AWS Community Day in Nordics, like in Copenhagen. I'm headed to AWS Community Day in Istanbul. And I'll be doing the one in New York City, you know, but really trying to, you know, participate actively

And their communities that they're also helping to serve as part of your, you know, as you're bringing them into yours. I think those are really, really important. And then, you know, you have to make sure that people have fun. Right. Like it's a shocker, but people like participating in places where they enjoy being there. So I think those are probably like my main call outs.

And have you ever had, I guess, you know, whenever you have a community, there's always going to be sometimes people misbehaving or people are not following some of the rules around the community. Have you got any tips on how to deal with those confrontations? Because most of us just want to avoid confrontations as much as possible. But, you know, if we don't do something about it, then it's just going to mean that more and more people that are not respecting others get away with it. And there's going to be more of that in your community.

Yeah, no, I, I, you know, I don't have a problem. I don't like conflict, but I don't mind sticking up for myself and I don't mind sticking up for others. And I've had to do this, you know, number of times. And I think too, sometimes, you know, understanding, you know, people's intent also matters. And so, you know, like the, maybe the way I approach, you know, a specific community member, if you can tell, like, sometimes it just doesn't,

different vocabulary or like, you know, how people handle things and, you know, process information. But also, you know, you can definitely see when people are, you know, leaving others out or, you know, push trying to push people out of the conversation. I mean, I will definitely handle that directly. I'm not going to do that in a public forum unless I've already talked to somebody privately, you know, a number of times. But I've I've had multiple calls with folks, you know,

in the communities that I've been a part of, you know, even since Stackery. And I was even had to deal, you know, with, you know, kind of helping to, I guess, how do I even say this? But I think you remember, you know, we had some issues at Stackery early on. So, you know, we were kind of banished from the community, you know, and then having to, you know, to work to kind of become part of it again.

So I think really is kind of like dealing with it head on. I have no problem. So if there's anybody that's part of the AWS community that's been having issues with anybody or has had a less than ideal experience at an event, please do not ever hesitate to reach out to me because I am definitely happy to take those head on. And unfortunately,

They still happen, but I guess I would say fortunately they don't happen every day and nor do they happen every week. But I think I think I at least I feel good that I think people trust me and trust if I come to them like I'm not doing it just because I'm trying to cause an issue or I want to complain about something. It's because there's really something behind this and we want to make it better.

Yeah, I remember the incident you mentioned about what happened with StackGrid. And I also remember there was some incident that happened with SST and one of the conferences that they were trying to run as well, which I think you got dragged into. I mean, I think you're absolutely right that when someone does something that you think is wrong, you should speak out. There shouldn't be any problems with that. You should be tough and should be fair. But I guess one of the things I don't quite like about some of the

some of the pushbacks. It's just that this whole cancel culture is just silly. People can make mistakes, even bad intention ones. So, okay, we point it out. We fix it. We move on. You shouldn't be punishing people more than they deserve. And yeah, so absolutely, I think I totally agree with you on that.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of cancel culture either. You won't see me piling on on any of those. I don't like to participate in those type of discussions. I don't think that's good for anybody. It's not helpful. But I think talking to somebody directly, you know, and coming to somebody and I think probably to people are a lot more open to listening to your feedback. If you know you're coming to me privately to say, hey, here's what I've heard. Here's what I noticed. Yeah.

Or here's how you made me feel. And I, you know, I didn't appreciate it. And like telling them why. And that way you can kind of move past it. Because sometimes I think, too, people didn't, you know, sometimes it's a simple mistake. I mean, I think even, you know, when I remember Jeremy Daly and I, when we planned that serverless days for everyone party. And, you know, I think he was getting all the thanks and a couple of like people's thanks.

blog posts and call outs. And I was definitely just as much of the part of organizing that as he was. And so I just reached out to the folks that were like, I felt like that were leaving me out and just said, hey, this isn't a good look for the ecosystem as a whole, because everybody knows I was part of this and you're leaving me out specifically.

And, you know, it just slipped their mind. And so they actually came out, you know, did a public apology, which I didn't ask for. It wasn't needed. I just wanted to make sure to do better like the next time. So I think, you know, really kind of handling those things one to one is better for everyone.

Yeah, and also I think you mentioned there using the right vocabulary for those conversations, because I think especially when it comes to public, if you try to get someone to change their behavior, the worst thing you can do is to try to call them out in public. It's just going to push them into defensive position. It's natural. We're all going to do that. If someone comes to me, accusing me of something that I didn't think I intentionally do wrong,

and they make it a whole public thing, then of course, even if I know I'm kind of in the wrong, I'm going to try to stand up and defend myself. You're kind of pushing me into a corner. So people that try to name and shame people in public, it's not going to get you the kind of response that you're looking for, and it's not going to be good for everybody either.

Well, let me know who's doing that to you. And I'll say something like, I don't, I don't appreciate that at all. And I think you're right. You're, you're, you're, if you're getting called out in public, you're listening to defend, you're not listening for understanding. Right. And I think one-to-one you can be listening for understanding instead of as a very different, you know, experience, you know, if I'm listening to defend versus listening to understand, you know, the outcome of this conversation is going to be very, very different.

Yeah. And you've got a couple of talks. I'm going to see you in person in Istanbul in a couple of weeks. So really looking forward to that. Can you just talk about for a second? This is like five

Five years ago, we were traveling all over. We were at so many different serverless days. I remember it was serverless days, Belfast. Belfast, that's it, yeah. We were looking for you and we're texting you to figure out where you were at. And then we turned a corner and there you were coming out of the Apple store because you had to get a... I think you were getting a new computer or something or something that you forgot, but you've just come out of the Apple store. Yeah, that's it. I...

Yeah, I forgot my charger. That's it. I forgot my charger and I was doing a talk the next day. So obviously my laptop was going to die. So I had to quickly go to the Apple store and get a charger. And I was looking for you guys. So I should step out, turn around. Oh, that's Farrah. That's Jeremy. That was pretty amazing. I thought that was awesome. It was just so cool just because, yeah, I mean, we were just texting you and like looked up and there you were. Yep. Awesome.

Yeah, how small is Dublin? Oh, so it was Belfast. It was Belfast. Yeah, we took a picture in front of that fish. That fish, yes. I remember that. That was a really good event as well. It was really well run.

It was, yeah. I missed the Serverless Days event. I'm hoping to get to at least a couple this year. Yeah, they're back now. No, they just had, I think Matt Lewis just announced the Cardiff one. And then there's one in Milan soon as well. So yeah, I'm hoping to see more of them. I know there's a couple ones also in Asia now. I think in India there's one. I think there's, are there going to be one in the US somewhere as well?

I'm not sure. I don't know. I knew about India and I knew about, I think Japan definitely is doing serverless days. Tokyo. Okay. There's one in Auckland. Yeah.

Belfast, Sydney. Okay. Yeah, there's quite a few of them. And yeah, I'd like to see more of the serverless data events as well. They were always some of my favorites. They're not the biggest industry events, but they are much more intimate. If you know people that are there, they're always interested in the serverless. And you're not just talking to someone who's there because the company bought the tickets to a big event.

tech conference. They actually, because it's, you know, grassroots, it's, you know, affordable tickets and it's all people that are actually interested in this stuff and want to talk about it and share their stories. I've been waiting for one of the surplus days to have a Lambda, like, 10th birthday party. I mean, because this year, this year is Lambda's 10th birthday. It's also ECS's 10th birthday, which is crazy. I didn't realize that they were, you know, developed at the same time. But, yeah, I...

Yeah, I didn't realize ECS was 2014 as well. I know Lambda was 2014. I know Docker was officially 1.0, also 2014 as well. I didn't realize ECS was also announced the same year. Kubernetes is their two-part day this year. So Docker did something that everything else followed, that you followed, because, yeah, Kubernetes is, I think it was like June, and then you have ECS and Lambda, which are both re-invent time, so in November. Yeah.

Right. Yeah, looking forward to that. I hope someone is going to throw a nice pig party. I like the one that you and Jeremy threw a couple of years ago. That was a really nice one. Yeah, hint, hint. Like maybe they believe in several of us thinking about that. But anyway, it's nice to hint

And birthday this year. So I definitely think it's something to celebrate. Maybe we can get Tim on the stage or somewhere to like beat up another server. Like I think he did at one of the serverless days events. It was the serverless conf. I think it was the first serverless conf. I think it might have been in the, in Australia. Yeah. I remember that he, I think he took a hammer or an ax and just used to smash a server on stage. Yeah.

That's cool. I'm looking forward to re-invent this year. It's been about two years since it last went. So I'm looking forward to seeing everyone in person again. It's the one time of the year that I see everybody because that's the one time where everybody's in one place.

I love reInvent. There is nothing like it. You know, you have folks from all over the world, you know, that are like a lot of people have been working on, you know, products or features or whatever, you know, that they are introducing at reInvents.

you know, you just have this like, you know, people are just excited to see one another. I mean, I don't think there's anywhere else that I've ever been that you can, you know, grab people from all over, you know, that you can like, and then meet up with people that have similar interests as you. It is crazy. And I feel like I need to sleep for about a week after. And I usually walk about 68 miles in

six days, which is crazy. But it is definitely my favorite time of year. Definitely my favorite event. I've always loved it. This will be my eighth re reinvent this year, which is, yeah.

I guess also for you guys, you probably already started to prepare and organize things around now, right? Even though it's still about six months away. I started in February. Yeah, that's right. It is intense. Can I just say it is so much more fun to go as a hero than it is as an employee? Yeah.

It's so much more fun, even just as an attendee. I think for newcomers, it might be really hard, but find somebody from the AWS community. If you're going in your first time to re-invent, reach out to somebody that's been there so you have a friend that can help to show you around because it is exhausting. And even trying to figure out how to get out of the hotel or the casino can be a challenge at times. I think I've walked in circles

Bunch of times, you know, when I'm there. But yeah, and hopefully maybe we'll, I haven't seen you at a re-invent and yeah, it's been two years. I think the last time I came to Amsterdam when I came over to, when I was speaking there.

Yeah, it's been a couple of years. I'm really looking forward to going back there again. And like you said, it's crazy. Just getting out of the hotel is about half an hour walk. The hotel is everything just so massive over there, especially compared to what we used to over here in Europe.

But it's crazy. It's amazing to actually be able to catch up with everyone. I think I met Ben Cahill for the first time, I think a couple of years ago in person. I've been chatting with him forever on social media, but it's not every day that you can get to meet those guys in person. And Jeremy and everybody else as well. I think I met a lot of people face-to-face for the first time at reInvent a couple of years ago.

Yeah, I remember like even having that breakfast that we had that was like super early in the morning. Yeah, all the Europeans were just still just okay, walking out in the morning, walking out like four o'clock in the morning, can't sleep. You have your Denny's breakfast at 4am. But now you have Ben Kehoe, like he's part of your European team. Yeah, he's in Germany now.

Yeah. So what is your talk on? Actually, I don't think I told you what I was talking about at the community day. Yeah, I saw your title, Breaking Down the Business of Communities and Wildlife Care. I was quite interested to get you to maybe show us a little bit more about what you're going to be talking about.

Yeah, so I was going to talk about, you know, how, you know, communities, you know, the feedback, it's not just, it's crucial for, you know, businesses, but it's also, it's, you know, good business for individuals too. You know, being part of a community can provide invaluable, like, support, you know, resources, opportunities for growth, you know.

I mean, like my career, everything has come from participating in communities. And I actually when I was trying to break into tech, it wasn't until I started volunteering at this conference before I was even looked at at all. And this is after like a year of seeing applications.

You know, but I found, you know, mentors, you know, I had people there that were willing to, you know, help encourage and, you know, support me. But also, you know, you find people that have like, you know, you have like trust and belonging and, you know, you know, just again, like the support and the resources alone that you can find in different ecosystems is just it can be really, really powerful. But also, you know, we're looking at like what, you know, can do for like a business.

I'm going to grab some stats like that Salesforce had published. But, you know, people that are participated in the community, you know, reporting like 80 percent improved productivity, 80 percent increased adoption, you know, 90 percent improved innovation, you know, and they they find that they are able to discover new solutions, you know, via the community on a much easier basis. And so, you know, really like, you know, you get people

you know, better feedback, you get better insights into, you know, what customers are looking for. You can get issues brought to your awareness, you know, so you can act instead of, you know, you can act on instead of having to react to something. But so, yeah, that's kind of the gist of it is, you know, how important the community has been to me, but also how I've been able to, you know, prove the value of the community, you know, to the business.

Right. And you just mentioned there in terms of you had so many struggles breaking into tech. I guess I've never really heard your story about how you got into tech. Do you have any tips in terms of someone who's trying to get into tech now and what are some of the things that they should try to do? And one of the things would be joining a community and participating. Any other tips?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, obviously, you know, actively, you know, going to the events that you can, I think, you know, being, you know, using social media platforms. So like one of the things I did is actually when I came into the serverless ecosystem, you know, I found the AWS Serverless Heroes and I followed all of you.

And then I just started trying to become part of conversations. And a lot of what I mean, how to be how I became part of that was really just actively sharing and trying to highlight the work that you were all doing, because I didn't have anything to add. I think, you know, once I did have information, you know, I would share what I had learned.

I think, you know, looking to, you know, do like five minute favors. So trying to find ways to, you know, to help others because then in turn that ends up helping you in the end, you know? So I think that's, you know, that's,

pretty good tips um and i think too just initiating conversations right like starting a conversation with somebody you know take that chance and just to go introduce yourself and you know to to get to know people and then you know try to follow up with them you know it was great to meet you at this event you know here maybe here's something i thought that we might be able to partner on or i was looking to get more information here um or um yeah just

I think kind of stepping out of your comfort zone with these and being active and engaged in maybe even open source projects. That can also be a good opportunity to get involved if that's something that is interesting to you.

But I do think it can be a little bit uncomfortable, right? So I think, you know, it's just kind of getting the courage to step outside of your comfort zone and, you know, attending these events. And if, you know, if you, you know, trying to find somebody else from the community, if you're not comfortable doing so yourself. That's what I did in my very first serverless comp. I was going to go to this hackathon event.

But I was so nervous. And so I, you know, I reached out to Forest Brazil and I'm like, hey, you seem nice on Twitter. You know, would you be my friend when I show up? Because I'm not going to know anybody. And he's like, absolutely. So he met me at the door and, you know, brought me in and it made me feel a lot more comfortable.

Yeah, Forrest and Pete Sparsky are probably two of the nicest people, most gentle people I've ever met, especially Pete. I love that guy. He's just such a gentleman. But yeah, I remember... So smart. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I remember, was it two years ago or three years ago, we had that with Pete shirt everybody was wearing.

Yeah, I actually wore that from my talk when I did the talk at Re-Enter. So, and then, like, I have actually have a funny picture with him and I. He's, like, standing there. But, yeah, I think that became from an event where Rebecca had asked, where's Peter? And he was, like, standing right behind her. And it was...

But yeah, it's so much fun to think about all these of how this all kind of came about. I feel like we have such like, yeah, it was such a great time, you know, and it's cool that I love that I still get to work with everybody just like in a different capacity.

So I guess in that case, one last question I have is just what's the, I guess, what's your plan for going forward for the Heroes and the Community Builders program? Anything else that you have, I guess, in the horizon?

Well, I think that I'd love to be able to kind of scale some of the work that I've done. And I think that, you know, I've developed a lot of great relationships internally, you know, with the containers and serverless and the dev tooling team. But there is a lot more out there. Right. And so, you know, teams like Cognito and, you know, just like verify permissions and just trying to think about, you know, other services that are highly that work.

everybody's going to be utilizing a lot, you know, and so starting to develop some trust there to, you know, basically scale the work to be able to bring, you know, a more broad scope to get you folks or to bring a more broad amount of folks to be able to bring to you all to provide feedback to start to participate on. Maybe you guys are getting tired of talking to the Lambda team, which I'm just kidding. I don't think that's the truth, but

I know there's a lot more teams at AWS that I haven't interfaced with, and I think that a lot of them could benefit from the community feedback that I'm able to provide to the team that I've been working with.

Yeah, and also now, like you said, there's 2,000 people in the Builders program, there's 250 in the Heroes program. That's a lot of people that you need to kind of figure out who should be talking to whom. That's not a one-person job. That's something that needs a bit, I guess, more people involved from AWS, perhaps, than just yourself, everything going through you. You become this tiny little funnel between all the different AWS teams and all the people in the communities. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a little problematic, too, when I'm traveling a lot because I do end up being a blocker at some point. But hopefully, you know, I'll be able to help to kind of scale the work and share, you know, what the lessons that I've learned, what's worked really well. And then also, you know, what hasn't. And so we can get better at this. But.

Yeah, there is going to be, there's going to be someone other than doing it than just me. That's for sure. But I don't know how I'd ever, like, I don't know how I would step away from this role. Like, that's the thing is like, I don't, I love what I do. I absolutely love it. And so it's, you know, it's hard to think about a different role at AWS just because I don't think I could ever not work with the community and be happy. Well, I hope you keep doing this because I really enjoyed having you on.

Yeah, I'm so excited to see you. Well, no, it's not. It's this month now. Yeah, it's this month in about two and a half weeks. Yeah. Looking forward to it as well. I'm excited. Well, Farah, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. And like I said, it's been a pleasure working with you all these years and hope to continue to keep working with you for a very, very long time. And, you know, yeah, look forward to seeing you in person in a couple of weeks time.

Awesome. Me too. And thank you so much for having me. Take it easy. Okay. Bye-bye. So that's it for another episode of Real World Serverless. To access the show notes, please go to realworldserverless.com. If you want to learn how to build production-ready serverless applications, please check out my upcoming courses at productionreadyserverless.com. And I'll see you guys next time.