AWS News Blog
Meet the Newest AWS Heroes! June 2019
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At the heart of the global AWS community are the builders and influencers whose passion for AWS leads them to actively share their technical know-how with others. The most prominent of these AWS community leaders are recognized as AWS Heroes. Heroes regularly share their extensive AWS knowledge online via blogs, social media, and open source contributions, and in person by speaking at industry conferences and running workshops or AWS-focused User Groups.
Today we are thrilled to introduce the latest cohort of AWS Heroes:
Anton Babenko – Oslo, Norway
Community Hero Anton Babenko is a long time developer and CTO who runs a consulting company Betajob AS in Norway. He helps companies around the globe build solutions using AWS, and specializes in infrastructure as code, DevOps, and reusable infrastructure components. Anton spends a large amount of his time as an open-source contributor on various Terraform & AWS projects, including terraform-aws-modules and modules.tf. He enjoys solving real cloud architecture tasks, figuring out generic solutions by getting to the core, and making them available as open source to let the whole AWS community benefit. Anton also co-founded and co-organizes AWS, DevOps, and HashiCorp User Groups in Norway, DevOpsDays Oslo, and often speaks at various technical Meetups and conferences.
Bhuvaneswari Subramani – Bengaluru, India
Community Hero Bhuvaneswari Subramani is Director Engineering Operations at Infor. She has almost two decades of IT experience, specializing in Cloud Computing, DevOps, and Performance Testing. She holds the AWS Certified Solution Architect Professional certification, is a co-organizer of the AWS User Group Bengaluru, and is instrumental in organizing Meetups & AWS Community Day Bengaluru. Bhuvaneswari is also an active speaker at AWS community events, industry conferences and delivers guest lectures on Cloud Computing for staff & students at engineering colleges affiliated to Anna University. She is a technophile & IT Blogger, who meticulously and picturesquely depicts the events that inspires & influences her. Her passion for technical writing is exemplified in the form of tech blog DevOps and CloudComputing for over a decade and of late, she constantly writes about AWS conferences and Meetups on the AWS User Group Bengaluru Blog.
Colin Percival – Vancouver, Canada
Community Hero Colin Percival is the founder of Tarsnap, a secure online backup service which combines the flexibility and scriptability of the standard UNIX “tar” utility with strong encryption, deduplication, and the reliability of Amazon S3 storage. Having started work on Tarsnap in 2006, Colin is among the first generation of users of Amazon Web Services, and has written dozens of articles about his experiences with AWS on his blog. Colin has been a member of the FreeBSD project for 15 years and has served in that time as the project Security Officer and a member of the Core team; starting in 2008 he led the efforts to bring FreeBSD to the Amazon EC2 platform, and for the past 7 years he has been maintaining this support, keeping FreeBSD up to date with all of the latest changes and functionality in Amazon EC2.
Francesco Pochetti – Luxembourg
Machine Learning Hero Francesco Pochetti first got in touch with Machine Learning back in 2013, taking Stanford’s ML MOOC by Andrew Ng. Now he leverages the wonders of AWS AI infrastructure, plays around with new services, builds ML solutions and lets the world know about his projects on his blog. This is where he regularly posts all his experiments in Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Most notably, within the AWS domain, Inferring movie genre from its poster in AWS SageMaker, Analyzing IMDb reviews sentiment with Amazon Comprehend or Running Neural Style Transfer with Lambda and GPU-powered EC2s.
Guy Ernest – Tel Aviv, Israel
Machine Learning Hero Guy Ernest is busy in taking machine learning and AI to the masses to three audiences. The main audience he engages are software developers (SDE) and converting them to machine learning engineers (MLE), using the popular fastai library, PyTorch, and Amazon AI services. The next audience is business people in large enterprises that are learning the applicability of machine learning to their business and the way to conduct the AI transformation of their organization. Finally, Guy works with kids who are starting their AI/ML learning journey by enabling them with Alexa skills, computer vision, and robots in after school and summer camp activities.
Kesha Williams – Atlanta, USA
Machine Learning Hero Kesha Williams has over 20 years of experience in software development. She successfully transformed her engineering skills from Java Developer to ML Practitioner by leaning hands on with AWS AI solutions like AWS DeepLens, Amazon Rekognition, and Amazon SageMaker. Kesha believes that as we all benefit from integrating technology into our everyday lives, we still struggle to make meaningful relationships with each other. To solve this, Kesha develops ML models on Amazon SageMaker using computer vision and natural language processing to help us better connect with people around us. Kesha is also very active in the community helping others find their path to machine learning. She authors courses for learning platforms such as Manning Publications, Packt, LinkedIn Learning, A Cloud Guru, and Cloud Academy.
Manoj Fernando – Sri Lanka
Community Hero Manoj Fernando is a Technical Lead at 99X Technology in Sri Lanka and the CTO of Whatif AS in Norway. He is passionate about designing scalable and cost-effective cloud architectures on the AWS cloud platform. His team was one of the early adopters of AWS Lambda back in 2015, and he is one of the co-organizers of Serverless Sri Lanka Meetup. During his leisure time, he creates cloud training videos for the community on his YouTube channel. The training videos are focused on Modern Application Development, Cloud Certifications, and Cutting-edge cloud services. He is also a technical blogger, blogging on medium as well as on his website, and a public speaker, conducting cloud workshops for university students in Sri Lanka.
Margaret Valtierra – Chicago, USA
Community Hero Margaret Valtierra is a Program Manager for the Cloud Service team at Morningstar. She is responsible for managing the AWS relationship and promoting cloud skills and best practices. She has organized and led the Chicago AWS user group since 2013. She is a member of the Global AWS Community Day Core Team, promoting user groups and organizing the annual Midwest AWS Community Day. Margaret is also a co-organizer for DevOpsDays Chicago and is an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate.
Marco Viganò – Milan, Italy
Community Hero Marco Viganò is the CTO of Condé Nast Italy. He has more than 20 years of experience in IT, with a specific focus on media and publishing sector. He is a frequent speaker at AWS Summits and events, sharing design patterns for developing and operating highly scalable cloud solutions for the media and publishing industry. He is focused on Serverless and Machine Learning and one of his main topics is finding new technologies to improve systems. Also, he operates as Voice First evangelist inside the company using Alexa and AWS services.
Pavlos Mitsoulis – London, United Kingdom
Machine Learning Hero Pavlos Mitsoulis has 7 years of Machine Learning and Software Engineering experience. Currently, he is a Staff Software Engineer (Machine Learning) at HomeAway (an Expedia Group brand), leading Machine Learning initiatives to support growth marketing. Additionally, he is the creator of Sagify, an open-source library that simplifies training, tuning, evaluating, and deploying ML models to SageMaker. Recently Pavlos authored a Packt video course, “Hands-On Machine Learning Using Amazon SageMaker“.
Vicky Seno – Los Angeles, USA
Container Hero Vicky “Tanya” Seno is a Computer Science Professor at Santa Monica College. At SMC she teaches numerous AWS courses covering Computing Services, Containers, Kubernetes, ECS, Serverless, Networking and Security. Vicky has helped develop an AWS Cloud Computing College Degree and is part of a team that helps train and mentor faculty from nineteen local colleges in AWS, to help expand AWS course offerings in the Los Angeles area. She is also a co-organizer of AWS Cloud Day Conference at SMC that includes SA speakers, AWS workshops and a AWS CTF attended by over 130+ students at each event. In an effort to increase female representation in this field, Vicky has been involved in various speaking and training activities. Vicky hosts a YouTube Channel with over 34,000 followers and 100+ beginners tech tutorials. She has also spoken at AWS Summits on Containers, Kubernetes, and Amazon EKS.
You can learn about all the AWS Heroes from around the globe by checking out the Hero website.