Announcing the newest AWS Heroes – August 2020

The AWS Heroes program recognizes a select few individuals who go above and beyond to share AWS knowledge and teach others about AWS, all while helping make building AWS skills accessible to many. These leaders have an incredible impact within technical communities worldwide and their efforts are greatly appreciated.

Today we are excited to introduce to you the latest AWS Heroes, including the first Heroes from Greece and Portugal:

Angela Timofte – Copenhagen, Denmark

Serverless Hero Angela Timofte is a Data Platform Manager at Trustpilot. Passionate about knowledge sharing, coaching, and public speaking, she is committed to leading by example and empowering people to seek and develop the skills they need to achieve their goals. She is driven to build scalable solutions with the latest technologies while migrating from monolithic solutions using serverless applications and event-driven architecture. She is a co-organizer of the Copenhagen AWS User Group and frequent speaker about serverless technologies at AWS Summits, AWS Community Days, ServerlessDays, and more.

Avi Keinan – Tel Aviv, Israel

Community Hero Avi Keinan is a Senior Cloud Engineer at DoIT International. He specializes in AWS Infrastructure, serverless, and security solutions, enjoys solving complex problems, and is passionate about helping others. Avi is a member of many online AWS forums and groups where he assists both novice and experienced cloud users with solving complex and simple solutions. He also frequently posts AWS-related videos on his YouTube channel.

Hirokazu Hatano – Tokyo, Japan

Community Hero Hirokazu Hatano is the founder & CEO of Operation Lab, LLC. He created the Japan AWS User Group (JAWS-UG) CLI chapter in 2014 and has hosted 165 AWS CLI events over a six-year period, with 4,133 attendees. In 2020, despite the challenging circumstances of COVID-19, he has successfully transformed the AWS CLI events from in-person to virtual. In the first quarter of 2020, he held 12 online hands-on events with 1,170 attendees. In addition, he has organized six other JAWS-UG chapters, making him one of the most frequent JAWS-UG organizers.

Ian McKay – Sydney, Australia

Community Hero Ian McKay is the Cloud Lead at Kablamo. Between helping clients, he loves the chance to build open-source projects with a focus on AWS automation and tooling. Ian built and maintains both the “Former2” and “Console Recorder for AWS” projects which help developers author Infrastructure as Code templates (such as CloudFormation) from existing resources or while in the AWS Management Console. Ian also enjoys speaking at meetups, co-hosting podcasts, engaging with the community on Slack, and posting his latest experiences with AWS on his blog.

Jacopo Nardiello – Milan, Italy

Container Hero Jacopo Nardiello is CEO and Founder at SIGHUP. He regularly speaks at conferences and events, and closely supports the local Italian community where he currently runs the Kubernetes and Cloud Native Milano meetup and regularly collaborates with AWS and the AWS Milan User Group on all things containers. He is passionate about developing and delivering battle-tested solutions based on EKS, Fargate, and OSS software – both from the CNCF and AWS – like AWS Firecracker (the base for Lambda), AWS Elasticsearch Open Distro, and other projects.

Jérémie Rodon – Paris, France

Community Hero Jérémie Rodon is a 9x certified AWS Cloud Architect working for Devoteam Revolve. He has 3 years of consulting experience, designing solutions in various environments from small businesses to CAC40 companies, while also empowering clients on AWS by delivering AWS courses as an AWS Authorized Instructor Champion. His interests lie mainly in security, and especially cryptography: he has done presentations explaining how AWS KMS works under the hood and has written a blog post explaining why the quantum crypto-calypse will not happen.

Kittaya Niennattrakul – Bangkok, Thailand

Community Hero Kittaya Niennattrakul (Tak) is a Product Manager and Assistant Managing Director at Dailitech. Tak has helped run the AWS User Group Thailand since 2014, and is also one of the AWS Asian Women’s Association leaders. In 2019, she and the Thailand User Group team, with support from AWS, organized two big events: AWS Meetup – Career Day (400+ attendees), and AWS Community Day in Bangkok (200+ attendees). Currently, Tak helps write a blog for sharing useful information with the AWS community. In 2020, AWS User Group Thailand has more than 8,000+ members and continues growing.

Konstantinos Siaterlis – Athens, Greece

Machine Learning Hero Konstantinos Siaterlis is Head of Data Engineering at Orfium, a Music Rights Management company based in Malibu. During his day-to-day, he drives adoption/integration and training on several AWS services, including Amazon SageMaker. He is the co-organizer of AWS User Group Greece, and a blogger on TheLastDev, writing about Data Science and introductory tutorials on AWS Machine Learning Services.

Kyle Bai – Taichung City, Taiwan

Container Hero Kyle Bai, also known as Kai-Ren Bai, is a Site Reliability Engineer at MaiCoin. He is a creator and contributor of a few open-source projects on GitHub about AWS, Containers, and Kubernetes. Kyle is a co-organizer of the Cloud Native Taiwan User Group. He is also a technical speaker, with experience delivering presentations at meetups and conferences including AWS re:Invent re:Cap Taipei, AWS Summit Taipei, AWS Developer Year-end Meetup Taipei, AWS Taiwan User Group, and so on.

Linghui Gong – Shanghai, China

Community Hero Linghui Gong is VP of Engineering at Strikingly, Inc. One of the early AWS users in China, Linghui has been leading his team to drive all critical architecture evolutions on AWS, including building a cross-region website cluster that serves millions of sites worldwide. Linghui shared the story of his teams’ cross-region website cluster on AWS at re:Invent 2018. He has also presented AWS best practices twice at AWS Summit Beijing, as well as at many other AWS events.

Luca Bianchi – Milan, Italy

Serverless Hero Luca Bianchi is Chief Technology Officer at Neosperience. He writes on Medium about serverless and Machine Learning, where he focuses on technologies such as AWS CDK, AWS Lambda, and Amazon SageMaker. He is co-founder of Serverless Meetup Italy and co-organizer of ServerlessDays Milano and ServerlessDays Italy. As an active member of the serverless community, Luca is a regular speaker at user groups, helping developers and teams to adopt cloud technologies.

Matthieu Napoli – Lyon, France

Serverless Hero Matthieu Napoli is a software engineer passionate about helping developers to create. Fascinated by how serverless unlocks creativity, he works on making serverless accessible to everyone. Matthieu enjoys maintaining open-source projects including Bref, a framework for creating serverless PHP applications on AWS. Alongside Bref, he sends a monthly newsletter containing serverless news relevant to PHP developers. Matthieu recently created the Serverless Visually Explained course which is packed with use cases, visual explanations, and code samples.

Mike Chambers – Brisbane, Australia

Machine Learning Hero Mike Chambers is an independent trainer, specializing in AWS and machine learning. He was one of the first in the world to become AWS certified and has gone on to train well over a quarter of a million students in the art of AWS, machine learning, and cloud. An active advocate of AWS’s machine learning capabilities, Mike has traveled the world helping study groups, delivering talks at AWS Meetups, all while posting widely on social media. Mike’s passion is to help the community get as excited about technology as he is.

Noah Gift – Raleigh-Durham, USA

Machine Learning Hero Noah Gift is the founder of Pragmatic A.I. Labs. He lectures on cloud computing at top universities globally, including the Duke and Northwestern graduate data science programs. He designs graduate machine learning, MLOps, A.I., and Data Science courses, consults on Machine Learning and Cloud Architecture for AWS, and is a massive advocate of AWS Machine Learning and putting machine learning models into production. Noah has authored several books, including Pragmatic AI, Python for DevOps, and Cloud Computing for Data Analysis.

Olalekan Elesin – Berlin, Germany

Machine Learning Hero Olalekan Elesin is an engineer at heart, with a proven record of leading successful machine learning projects as a data science engineer and a product manager, including using Amazon SageMaker to deliver an AI enabled platform for Scout24, which reduced productionizing ML projects from at least 7 weeks to 3 weeks. He has given several talks across Germany on building machine learning products on AWS, including Serverless Product Recommendations with Amazon Rekognition. For his machine learning blog posts, he writes about automating machine learning workflows with Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Step Functions.

Peter Hanssens – Sydney, Australia

Serverless Hero Peter Hanssens is a community leader: he has led the Sydney Serverless community for the past 3 years, and also built out Data Engineering communities in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. His passion is helping others to learn and grow their careers through shared experiences. He ran the first ever ServerlessDays in Australia in 2019 and in 2020 he has organized AWS Serverless Community Day ANZ, ServerlessDays ANZ, and DataEngBytes, a community-built data engineering conference.

Ruofei Ma – Beijing, China

Container Hero Ruofei Ma works as a principal software engineer for FreeWheel Inc, where he focuses on developing cloud-native applications with AWS. He enjoys sharing technology with others and is a lecturer at time.geekbang.org, the biggest IT knowledge-sharing platform in China. He enjoys sharing his experience on various meetups, such as the CNCF webinar and GIAC. He is a committee member of the largest service mesh community in China, servicemesher.com, and often posts blogs to share his best practices with the community.

Sheen Brisals – London, United Kingdom

Serverless Hero Sheen Brisals is a Senior Engineering Manager at The LEGO Group and is actively involved in the global Serverless community. Sheen loves being part of Serverless conferences and enjoys sharing knowledge with community members. He talks about Serverless at many events around the world, and his insights into Serverless technology and adoption strategies can be found on his Medium channel. You can also find him tweeting about Serverless success stories and technical thoughts.

Sridevi Murugayen – Chennai, India

Data Hero Sridevi Murugayen has 16+ years of IT experience and is a passionate developer and problem solver. She is an active co-organizer of the AWS User Group in Chennai, and helps host and deliver AWS Community Days, Meetups, and technical sessions to the developer community. She is a regular speaker in community events focusing on analytics solutions using AWS Analytics services, including Amazon EMR, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon S3, and AWS Glue. She strongly believes in diversity and inclusion for a successful society and loves encouraging and enabling women technologists.

Stéphane Maarek – Lisbon, Portugal

Data Hero Stéphane Maarek is an online instructor at Udemy with many courses designed to teach users how to build on AWS (including the AWS Certified Data & Analytics Specialty certification) and deepen their knowledge about AWS services. Stephane also has a keen interest in teaching about Apache Kafka and recently partnered with AWS to launch an in-depth course on Amazon MSK (Managed Streaming for Apache Kafka). Stephane is passionate about technology and how it can help improve lives and processes.

Tom McLaughlin – Boston, USA

Serverless Hero Tom McLaughlin is a cloud infrastructure and operations engineer who has worked in companies ranging from startups to the enterprise. What drew Tom early to serverless was the prospect of having no hosts or container management platform to build and manage which yielded the question; what would he do if the servers he was responsible for went away? He’s found enjoyment in a community of people that are both pushing the future of technology and trying to understand its effects on the future of people and businesses.