Whether investing in Developer Advocacy teams or supporting Events, the Developer Community is vital for engineers. You need a place where you can turn to ask questions and get advice. You can also share your insights and help others along the way. As time passes, your network will continue to grow, and you’ll become a better engineer. Investing in the Developer Community is essential, regardless of your skill level.
This article discusses the changes in the AWS Developer Advocacy team and our experiences at ServerlessDays Belfast.
ServerlessDays Belfast Recap
ServerlessDays Belfast had a Titanic theme this year. We located the event at the Titanic Hotel, where Belfast’s engineering history made for an excellent atmosphere. The big takeaway from ServerlessDays Belfast is that there’s way more adoption. The level of the talks, interactions, and experience is very high. We are taking away five or six things to look into.
There was a significant Developer Community aspect to the event. Everyone, from beginners to seasoned experts, had excellent and meaningful conversations. It’s not just the talks but also the conversations on the side, and the venue helped a lot with that. It was a great day and impactful. Anyone there got a lot out of it, and there was a buzz and energy. It was a very successful day, so well done!
Building Beyond Boundaries and the Developer Community
ServerlessDaysBelfast.com has all the details and content, and we have published videos of the talks. The theme was ‘Building Beyond Boundaries’. We wanted to raise the bar and use the Harland and Wolff Shipyard and Titanic story. And the fact that Titanic was built in Belfast 120 years ago. Harland and Wolff built something like 1500 ships and ocean liners. So it was a centre of engineering 100 years ago. It was great to bring that back around to what we do. The Titanic Hotel team inspired our audience with stories of what happened versus what we do now..
As we will discuss later, it’s hard to measure the impact of an event like ServerlessDays Belfast. You get 200-300 people in a room talking, learning, enjoying themselves and getting a bit of a spring in their step. It’s hard to put $1 amounts on what they bring back into their teams. It costs £60 per ticket and a day off work, which is not expensive. But what you get from that, as an engineer, when you return to your office is off the scale.
The importance of Developer Community events for engineers
There are low barriers to adopting what you hear or learn about at events like ServerlessDays. You may hear about a company adopting step functions, for example, and you can take that away and try it. However, you don’t need licencing or installation or an outlay of expense to get started. You can act on wondering if that’ll work in your context, company or for the problem you are trying to solve. So, the feedback loop from the content, speakers, and great ideas, and how you apply them to your ecosystem, context, and company, is tight.
Measuring those little nuggets of wisdom’s impact on junior or well-seasoned engineers is hard. They’ll take lots away and apply it to their business. And you may never hear how successful it was. Brilliant engineers are curious and learn from other people. If you put a brilliant engineer in a silo and ask them to build by themselves, they’ll probably mess it up. You’ve got to be curious, look outside your space, and be influenced and inspired by others. That’s how it works.
Jeremy Daly’s Keynote and work at Ampt
Serverless Days Belfast is one of the only events where you see the next iteration of something coming. There were excellent talks on the front end and approaches for Serverless. Then, Jeremy’s concept of what he was doing at Ampt. That’s certainly a different way of thinking. How do you apply that and look at things from slightly different angles?
Jeremy Daly did a brilliant job with the Keynote. And what he’s doing at Ampt is inspiring. He’s lifting the bar, not just one notch, many notches. So it’s great to see that. We have problems with the phrase Serverless because it doesn’t communicate what we’re doing at the event ServerlessDays or about what we do.
AWS Developer Advocate Team
There’s been a couple of things on Twitter this past couple of weeks about the guys and gals from the Developer Service DA team who are changing teams. We don’t want to get into the internals of AWS, but we want to pay tribute to a strong team that James Beswick has led. And before that, by Chris Munns. Over the last ten years, we’ve lapped up their content on Twitter, LinkedIn and at conferences. Our number one resource is the people on that team, and it’s where we learn everything we do. Let’s discuss that team and their massive impact on what we do.
They have had an enormous impact and are huge enablers for everything we’ve done in our careers. And with the barriers we were trying to push against, their content and the work they did gave us ammunition for challenging our status quo and the context we were dealing with. So, the external validation for our approach came from the Developer Advocacy Team. The blogs, patterns, examples, workshops, tutorials, or even getting some of them on calls and talking about our problems led to enablement and empowerment to try these things. They removed the barriers and friction we had. Kudos to them all.
Helpful advice rather than a hard sell
We don’t want to get personal, but when you are trying to do something new with step functions or simply need to know more, often the sales guys on the phone will try to sell you more stuff. But when you got one of the DAs on the phone, they could say that’s crazy, don’t use that. Use EventBridge instead, etc. They give you an honest answer based on their experience. So it was great to hear that unbiased opinion; they don’t have any product interest, they’re not trying to sell you something. It’s just someone who’s in the space, talks to lots of people, and they’re sound engineers. We find it super helpful and validating to hear their opinions on things. There were many times when you were thinking something and thought, ‘Oh, right, that’s interesting’. And why did he say that? And then you realised that you were utterly wrong.
The value of the Developer Advocacy team
Amazon is a big company with many services available for teams like us to collaborate with daily, and they’re changing all the time. And a lot of stuff gets missed. Suppose you look through the list of change requests every month. You can’t appreciate what’s changed or available. The DA Team highlights new things by creating blogs and working examples to show you how these things are progressing. It makes it consumable and allows us to build. They are the engine that builds the movement, shows what others are doing and fleshes it out. Look at the podcasts they are doing and the content they produce. It’s more consumable and leverageable.
If you read it back, you struggle to appreciate everything you can use it for. But when you see how someone leverages it, then that gets you thinking. The DA Team breathe life into what’s going on in Serverless. Julian’s talk at ServerlessDays breathed life into concepts of flow control. That notation is nice. Can we design this stuff in the abstract before we even consider services? You don’t get that from reading the spec. You need the team to bring it to life. That’s what they do, and hopefully, that’s what they continue to do.
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants for the Developer Community
With our modernisation, migration, and enablement work for organisations, we avoided undifferentiated heavy lifting by pointing to Serverless Land and the DA team and the patterns, examples, workshops, and tutorials they provided. We didn’t have to create that content or those courses, tutorials, workshops or blog posts. We could build on top of what they already put in place. So we were standing on the shoulders of the giants. When transforming a large enterprise, we could tailor the content to move ourselves up the value chain. So we’re standing on top of the work that they have enabled us to do.
How the AWS Developer Advocacy Team helped our transformation
Let’s be specific. We based the transformation at Liberty Mutual on the content that the DA Team was pushing out. It was validation that we weren’t making stuff up. Chris Munns formed the DA Team in 2015/16. We got to the point where we asked what he was tweeting about. What’s he talking about in the articles he is writing? And that was a good steer. James Beswick had solid blog posts with good content as the team grew. They ran lots of good conferences and different events.
Julian Wood came to the first ServerlessDays Belfast in 2020. I remember asking him to do a talk in Liberty IT and explain what Serverless is in plain English. He sat down and just explained, and it was brilliant. Over the last few year, he has been prominent at AWS re:Invent. He regularly gets recognised for the best Serverless talk. People recognise him in the street and take photographs of him. He’s like a rock star.
Resources available to the Developer Community
Eric Johnson is unbelievable. He organises so many events, and he is such a good speaker. Ben Smith created Serverless Espresso and brilliant step functions on EventBridge implementations. David Boyne with all the EDA stuff. EDA visualisations are incredible. Marcia Villalba’s YouTube channel is a wealth of information. The Serverless Land site is my go-to whenever anyone asks about the tech. Read and consume that entire site. And then we’ll talk because that’s our strategy.
We almost had our own internal Serverless Land with a mind map on this, a blog, and the different EMP patterns scattered around. Serverless Land brought it all together. So, instead of our custom-built resources, we can point people to Serverless Land. Even way back at the start, we were taking Chris Munns’s slides and putting them into our internal decks to drive messaging and create an environment where this messaging was slick.
Evolution of the Developer Advocacy Team
A few other people are on the team, but we are talking about people we know and have worked with. They’re all moving to different areas now. But there’s still a robust Developer Advocate movement within AWS. For me, Serverless is evolving. And there will always be a need for advocacy. What is challenging about Developer Advocacy, or Dev Rel, is its measure of success. It must be something other than articles written or talks done. Measuring the impact is hard, but I’m glad companies invest in Dev Rel because it’s how we learn.
The Serverless DA Team have had millions or even billions worth of impact. But they’ll probably never know because that type of enablement is so hard to measure. How many times have engineers leveraged that pattern in massive companies? Or how often has that blog post inspired Fortune 100 companies to build and assemble this way? How often have those slides helped convince the C-suite that it is the way to go? It’s hard to get tangible, quantifiable metrics on that. However, in our experience and from prolonged, anecdotal, alternate metrics, significant outcomes have been driven by their work.
The feedback loop between Engineers and DAs
Earlier in our careers, we would see some talk or some guy with a ponytail who said something interesting, but we could not remember who it was. Thousands of people like that just remember seeing a talk or livestream that set them off on a path. Last week, we discussed Opentelemetry and AWS disposition and were opinionated from our perspective. Engineers, architects, and developers have opinions, but we discuss them with the DAs. And you can rest assured they’re feeding back into AWS. They take our thoughts and opinions and help shape what’s going on in terms of the roadmap and progress for the Cloud Provider. They can take on critical feedback and run with it.
We hope the evolution of developer advocacy in AWS continues, and the feedback loop and shaping of product direction are still strong and top of mind.
We’ve had so many conversations where you ask for something, and they’re like, I’m not sure about that, but why don’t you contact the product team and explain what you’re trying to do? Because they would love a customer testimonial or feature request. We are looking forward to the content they will continue putting out there, and we will continue to follow them on their different channels.
The future of Serverless in the Developer Community
We sense a shift coming. We’ve been discussing event-driven architecture and EDA recently. An evolution is underway with some incredible vendors, like Vercel and Momento. We find ourselves repeating that Serverless is more than just Lambdas or Functions.
Do you have situational awareness? Do you know the value chain that you’re trying to bring to bear here? And what is the best technology or solution to deliver that value chain? For us, the model was Serverless for a long time. But as things evolve, there are new capabilities and components that you can plug in or a SaaS offering. And you may not use Lambda or Step Functions. We’ve been using the words modern cloud, modern cloud solutions or applications for a while. A higher level of abstraction is beginning to emerge, encompassed in Serverless.
That’s the craic. It is good to reflect on the Serverless DA Team. A massive thank you to the extended team for all their work.
Serverless Craic from The Serverless Edge
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