Not all heroes wear capes. Some are busy building tech communities and helping individuals realize their full potential, especially during this time of a pandemic. As leaders and shakers will say, the success of any technology relies on solid support from its user community.
The AWS Heroes program recognizes a vibrant, worldwide group of Amazon Web Services (AWS) experts whose enthusiasm for knowledge-sharing has a real impact within the community. Being recognized as Heroes go above and beyond to share knowledge in a variety of ways including online -- social media, blog posts, open-source projects, and forums, or in person at conferences, workshops, and user group events.
In the Philippines, at present, there are two (02) AWS Heroes and Raphael Francis Quisumbing is one of them. Having the distinction of the first Filipino AWS Hero in 2015, Rafi (as we call him in the Philippine tech community) is the current Vice-President of Engineering at Edukasyon.ph and one of the community leaders at the AWS User Group Philippines. Being an AWS Authorized Instructor and AWS Scout, Rafi is certified to teach cloud-enablement here and abroad.
“In the cloud, there are a lot of building blocks and services that you can leverage. These services help you in at least two ways: speed and cost. A number of solutions to problems that companies normally encounter are already in the cloud. We, as a global community, help them to have a well-trained pool of personnel to take advantage of these (AWS) services and components,” according to Rafi during a media roundtable at the AWS Summit Online ASEAN 2021 where he was one of the panelists in the Community Track who discussed “Building Your Developer Journey with AWS.”
Rafi mentioned that among the perks of being an AWS Hero, aside from having been given the opportunity to help as many people as possible, was to be invited to the AWS re:Invent conference — all expenses paid for by the event organizers. The AWS re:Invent of 2019 held in Las Vegas, Nevada was attended by more than 65,000 individuals.
Just this weekend, at the recently concluded community-organized Philippine Tech Week 2021, Rafi was one of the keynote speakers, he outlined how developers (individuals) and businesses can grow 4x through tech communities.
“There are more than a hundred tech communities in the Philippines now and they are heroes to the rescue. If you want to be exposed to technologies aside from the ones used by your company, join a tech community — and get to know the experiences of multi-companies,” said Rafi in his conference keynote.