Why I joined Amazon Web Services
How I became a Developer Avocado 🥑
Yay! I am very excited to share with you that I joined the DevRel team at Amazon Web Services as a Developer Advocate!! 🎉🙌
Let me quickly introduce myself. I am Gerard Sans. I am originally from Barcelona and living in the UK. Four years ago, I decided to quit my job as a Developer and start a solo career as a public speaker and trainer.
Would you quit your job today to start speaking at events and do trainings? Four years ago, I did just that
During these years, I became a Google Developer Expert, founded meetups, wrote blogs, co-organised conferences, hosted events as Master of Ceremonies, spoke at hundreds of events and trained thousands of Developers.
Why I joined AWS?
We need to go back to last September during a trip to Brasil to speak at VueJS Summit in Sao Paulo. Brasil is totally awesome! During that trip, I did a talk on how to implement motion at the VueSP meetup, a workshop on Vuex, a talk at the conference on GraphQL and a talk at the AngularSP meetup. Besides the busy schedule, I did all of those talks in Portuguese! Why I would do that!? I know right… 🇧🇷
I speak Spanish, Catalan, German, Portuguese and English. I learned Portuguese while living in Sao Paulo for 2 years.
For the GraphQL talk, I wanted something new and cool. I did this talk already using Prisma but for this event I wanted to use a different stack. I heard about AppSync and wanted to give it a try. On Tuesday, I sent a DM to Nader Dabit on Twitter (yes, Twitter) sharing my plan to aim for a talk and demo using AppSync for Saturday! Lol… This was a lot of work as I had to build both the client and the server from scratch besides the other talks. Thankfully, Nader gave me a great quickstart and from there I worked on my own for a couple of days. On Friday, I was able to deploy a working version so I could work on the slides.
Never be afraid to ask for help. It’s so easy and makes such a difference.
The day of the conference, I was able to share the demo with the audience so attendees were able to use it during the talk. Awesome! I definitely couldn’t have done it without the help from Nader.
This was quite an achievement as I built very quickly a rather complex application with almost no experience. The final app included:
- Client using AppSync
- Setup for CRUD operations (queries and mutations)
- Setup for real-time (subscriptions)
- Auto-generated GraphQL Server with authorization and custom resolvers
- Deployment to production
After the trip, I was very impressed with AppSync and the support I got from Nader. These really influenced my decision to apply for this role.
Below is the talk in question. Note it’s in Portuguese. Beleza =)
What now?
These days, I am meeting with everyone from my team in Seattle and getting up to date so I am able to contribute asap. I am working on a few new articles that should be out in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
As an Angular GDE, I will work close to the team to make sure the integration with AWS Services is awesome. Please contact me right away if you find any issues.
Thanks for reading
Would you like to be a Developer Advocate? Feel free to reach out to me with any questions or if you need mentoring.
Looking for speakers? Look no more
Are you an organiser of a meetup, event or conference interested in talks or workshops showing how to build AWSome Apps using GraphQL, Amplify and AppSync?
Ping any of us! Nader (@dabit3), Kurt (@kurtiskemple), Dennis Hills (@dmennis) or myself (@gerardsans) will be happy to check availability and dates for you. Let’s be in touch!
