Introducing the newest AWS Heroes – June, 2021

We at AWS continue to be impressed by the passion AWS enthusiasts have for knowledge sharing and supporting peer-to-peer learning in tech communities. A select few of the most influential and active community leaders in the world, who truly go above and beyond to create content and help others build better & faster on AWS, are recognized as AWS Heroes.

Today we are thrilled to introduce the newest AWS Heroes, including the first Heroes based in Perú and Ukraine:

Anahit Pogosova – Tampere, Finland

Data Hero Anahit Pogosova is a Lead Cloud Software Engineer at Solita. She has been architecting and building software solutions with various customers for over a decade. Anahit started working with monolithic on-prem software, but has since moved all the way to the cloud, nowadays focusing mostly on AWS Data and Serverless services. She has been particularly interested in the AWS Kinesis family and how it integrates with AWS Lambda. You can find Anahit speaking at various local and international events, such as AWS meetups, AWS Community Days, ServerlessDays, and Code Mesh. She also writes about AWS on Solita developers’ blog and has been a frequent guest on various podcasts.

Anurag Kale – Gothenburg, Sweden

Data Hero Anurag Kale is a Cloud Consultant at Cybercom Group. He has been using AWS professionally since 2017 and holds the AWS Solutions Architect – Associate certification. He is a co-organizer of the AWS User Group Pune; helping host and organize AWS Community Day Pune 2020 and AWS Community Day India 2020 – Virtual Edition. Anurag’s areas of interest include Amazon DynamoDB, relational databases, serverless data pipelines, data analytics, Infrastructure as Code, and sustainable cloud solutions. He is an active advocate of DynamoDB and Amazon Aurora, and has spoken at various national and international events such as AWS Community Day Nordics 2020 and various AWS Meetups.

Arseny Zinchenko – Kiev, Ukraine

Container Hero Arseny Zinchenko has over 15 years in IT, and currently works as a DevOps Team Lead and Data Security Officer at BetterMe Inc., a leading health & fitness mobile publisher. Since 2011 Arseny has used his blog to share expertise about DevOps, system administration, containerization, and cloud computing. Currently he is focused primary on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) and security solutions provided by AWS. He is a member of the biggest Ukranian DevOps community, UrkOps, where he helps others to build their best with AWS and containers. where he helps others to build their best with AWS and containers. He also helps implement DevOps methodology in their organizations by using Amazon CloudFormation and AWS managed services like Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, and EKS.

Azmi Mengü – Istanbul, Turkey

Community Hero Azmi Mengü is a Sr. Software Engineer on the Infrastructure Team at Armut / HomeRun. He has over 5 years of AWS cloud development experience and has expertise in serverless, containers, data, and storage services. Since 2019, Azmi has been on the organizing committee of the Cloud and Serverless Turkey community. He co-organized and acted as a speaker at over 50 physical and online events during this time. He actively writes blog posts about developing serverless, container, and IaC technologies on AWS. Azmi also co-organized the first-ever ServerlessDays Istanbul in Turkey and AWS Community Day Turkey events.

Carlos Cortez – Lima, Perú

Community Hero Carlos Cortez is the founder and leader of AWS User Group Perú and Founder and CTO of CENNTI, which helps Peruvian companies in their difficult journey to the cloud and the development of Machine Learning solutions. The two biggest AWS events in Perú, AWS Community Day Lima 2019 and AWS UG Perú Conference in 2021, were organized by Carlos. He is the owner of the first AWS Podcast in Latam, “Imperio Cloud” and “Al día con AWS”. He loves to create content for emerging technologies, which is why he created DeepFridays to educate people in Reinforcement Learning.

Chris Miller – Santa Cruz, USA

Machine Learning Hero Chris Miller is an entrepreneur, inventor, and CEO of Cloud Brigade. After winning the 2019 AWS DeepRacer Summit race in Santa Clara, he founded the Santa Cruz DeepRacer Meetup group. Chris has worked with AWS AI/ML product teams with DeepLens and DeepRacer on projects including The Poopinator, and What’s in my Fridge. He prides himself on being a technical founder with experience across a broad range of disciplines, which has led to a lot of crazy projects in competitions and hackathons, such as an automated beer brewery, animatronic ventriloquist dummy, and his team even won a Cardboard Boat Race!

Gert Leenders – Brussels, Belgium

DevTools Hero Gert Leenders started his career as a developer in 2001. Eight years ago, his focus shifted entirely towards AWS. Today, he’s an AWS Cloud Solution Architect helping teams build and deploy cloud-native applications and manage their cloud infrastructure. On his blog, Gert emphasizes hidden gems in AWS developer tools and day-to-day topics for cloud engineers like logging, debugging, error handling and Infrastructure as Code. He also often shares code on GitHub.

Lei Wu – Beijing, China

Machine Learning Hero Lei Wu is head of the machine learning team at FreeWheel. He enjoys sharing technology with others, and he publishes many Chinese language tech blogs at infoQ, covering machine learning, big data, and distributed computing systems. Lei works hard to promote deep learning adoption with AWS services wherever he can, including talks at Spark Summit China, World Artificial Intelligence Conference, AWS Innovate AI/ML edition, and AWS re:Invent where he shared FreeWheel’s best practices on deep learning with Amazon SageMaker.

Hidetoshi Matsui – Hamamatsu, Japan

Serverless Hero Hidetoshi Matsui is a developer at Startup Technology Inc. and a member of the Japan AWS User Group (JAWS-UG). On “builders.flash,” a web magazine for developers run by AWS Japan, the articles he has contributed are among the most viewed pages on the site since 2020. His most impactful achievement is the construction of a distribution site for JAWS-UG’s largest event, JAWS DAYS 2021 re:Connect. He made full use of various AWS services to build a low-latency and scalable distribution system with a serverless architecture and smooth streaming video viewing for nearly 4000 participants.

Philipp Schmid – Nuremberg, Germany

Machine Learning Hero Philipp Schmid is a Machine Learning & Tech Lead at Hugging Face, working to democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science. He has extensive experience in deep learning, deploying NLP models into production using AWS Lambda, and is an avid advocate of Amazon SageMaker to simplify machine learning, such as “Distributed Training: Train BART/T5 for Summarization using Transformers and Amazon SageMaker.” He loves to share his knowledge on AI and NLP at various meetups such as Data Science on AWS, and on his technical Blog.

Simone Merlini – Milan, Italy

Community Hero Simone Merlini is CEO and CTO at beSharp. In 2012 he co-founded the first AWS User Group in Italy, and he’s currently the organizer of the AWS User Group Milan. He’s also actively involved in the development of Leapp, an open-source project for managing and securing Cloud access in multi-account environments. Simone is also the editor in chief and writer for Proud2beCloud, a blog aimed to share highly specialized AWS knowledge to enable the adoption of cloud technologies.

Virginie Mathivet – Lyon, France

Machine Learning Hero Virginie Mathivet has been leading the DataSquad team at TeamWork since 2017, focused on Data and Artificial Intelligence. Their purpose is to make the most of their clients’ data, via Data Science or Data Engineering / Big Data, mainly on AWS. Virginie regularly participates in conferences and writes books and articles, both for the public (introduction to AI) and for an informed audience (technical subjects). She also campaigns for a better visibility of women in the digital industry and for diversity in the data professions. Her favorite cloud service? Amazon SageMaker of course!

Walid A. Shaari – Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

Container Hero Walid A. Shaari is the community lead for the Dammam Cloud-native AWS User Group, working closely with CNCF ambassadors, K8saraby, and AWS MENA community leaders to enable knowledge sharing, collaboration, and networking. He helped organize the first AWS Community Day – MENA 2020. Walid also maintains GitHub content for Certified Kubernetes Administrators (CKA) and Certified Kubernetes Security Specialists (CKS), and holds several active professional certifications: AWS Certified Associate Solutions Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, Certified Kubernetes Application Developer, Red Hat Certified Architect level IV, and more.

If you’d like to learn more about the new Heroes, or connect with a Hero near you, please visit the AWS Hero website.

— Ross;