Hello Readers,

Welcome back to read another blog about my experience joining the first edition of the “AWS Community Day Malaysia 2023”.

It was meticulously planned, and the location is conveniently accessible to everybody. One of the community builder, Dheeraj from India posted about his trip to Malaysia and about his talk in the AWS Community day Malaysia. By that time, registrations were closed. So I tried reaching Kaushik, and he said to be there on the event early (by 8 AM pretty hard to be there), since there will be some on-spot availabilities. I had to plan my day accordingly.

Unlike me you shouldn’t miss to get the updates for the upcoming events, right? So if you are based out of Malaysia and interested in learning about Cloud or AWS-related topics, then you should join the AWS User Group Malaysia. They conduct monthly meetups, events and and it’s an awesome opportunity to participate and cooperate with a flourishing community.

It’s a Saturday Morning and I had to reach the “Monash University” by 8 AM. I managed to be there around 8:20 AM. I had to register in the entrance and proceed forward. Glad, I could locate Kaushik in the registration counter. The process was smooth and I got my speaker card. They gave some stickers and a bag along with it.

Breakfast had already been served. I had my breakfast at home, so I sat in a corner and looked out over the college campus. People are rushing into the arena, pick up their cards, and eating breakfast. I was able to identify very few people with whom I have connect via LinkedIn. The rain began as the sky became gloomy.

We were all heading to the Auditorium for the Inauguration and “Keynote”. Kaushik, gave an in introduction and it started officially.

Rather than the usual form of Keynote, it was more of a conversion between “Peter Murray, Country General Manager – Malaysia and Asia Emerging Markets at AWS” and “Lip Guan Teh, Chief Technology Officer at Payments Network Malaysia“. It was fascinating and enlightening to hear from those experts. I was amazed by their vision and mission. Being a great land for financial or banking industries, Malaysia has travelled so long and there’s more to it.

Right after their conversion, our own Shafraz Rahim, Developer Community Program Manager was ready to capture our hearts and minds with his amazing talk.

What’s the best time to join the community?

Do you have your answer in mind? Shafraz started by explaining Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs and then he explained the different community programs available in AWS. He mentioned about AWS User Groups (We have three chapters in Malaysia – AWS UG KL, AWS US Penang, AWS US Johor). He mentioned about the AWS Heroes program and what are privileges being part of that crew.

He discussed the AWS Community Builders programme, how to become one, and the benefits of becoming a member of the AWS CB Community. I was ecstatic when he took the six CBs from Malaysian and displayed them on the slides. I am the only female builder, which is rather sad. So it’s an opportunity for more Malaysian Women in Tech to join the Community.

You can check here for more details on the community programs.

Two tracks were planned, and I already selected my tracks in the morning. Now I headed to Auditorium 2 for listening the next talk.

Sandip Das gave an insightful talk on Infrastructure as a Code using Terraform. He explained about CI/CD and the AWS services related to that (AWS Code Commit, AWS Codebuild, AWS Codepipeline).

Munim took the stage after him with another fantastic presentation about Architectures and Design Patterns. He had a wonderful agenda, and as an API enthusiast, I was eager to hear what he had to say.

Monoliths aren’t that bad. He explained the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly part of it with specific examples.

By then, it’s lunchtime. It is quite a simple decent lunch with Vegetarian and Non-Vegetarian options.

After Lunch, I went to Auditorium 1 to listen to Varun’s talk. It was about DevSecOps. We all talk about the importance of security. He clearly explained the importance of it while building the CI/CD pipeline with real-time examples and use cases.

After Varun Dheeraj continued on a great topic which is suitable for beginners.

He started with the basics and explained some of the EKS-related service in AWS.

Najib, a Malaysian peer community builder, resumed his presentation. He emphasizing on DevSecOps approach. Also he suggest some list of cool tools which could help us in achieving it.

Since I had to leave, I was rushing to meet Shafraz and had a little chat 😊

A few selfies and some networking with nice folks ❤️

My Participation certificate, it’s cool right?

My main takeaway:

🚀 Communities are the heart of everything 🧡. “Now” is the time to join those communities

🚀 About some cool AWS Services

🚀 Technology is for everyone

🚀 I should be joining more Dev related conferences and start networking instead of shying away 🙂

🚀 We need more women in tech to join the community programs

This is the first edition of AWS Community Day, Malaysia and looking forward to more and more events and more women speakers to be part of this 💗

Overall, it was a productive day filled with fresh knowledge and opportunities. The conference was well-organized, and the team behind it deserves much credit.