Adventure Through the Amazon: Welcome New AWS Community Heroes

Earlier this year we welcomed the first AWS Community Heroes. As I wrote at the time, these hard-working folks were selected for the program because they routinely deliver high-quality, impactful, developer-focused activities to the AWS Community.

More Heroes
Today I would like to welcome eight new heroes!

Java developer Satoshi Yokota is the Founder & CEO of Classmethod, a writer for Developers.IO, and a founding member of JAWS-UG. In 2010 he participated in the kickoff meeting of JAWS-UG and has help to expand it to more than 40 branches. JAWS-UG currently features more than 100 leaders, over 100 meetup events, over 1000 members.

Brazilian developer Heitor Vital has been working with mobile games/applications and web development for over 10 years. He blogs on developer-oriented AWS topics and recently earned an Executive MBA. As CTO of Site Blindado SA, his work focuses on security, cloud computing, and infrastructure.

Based in Berlin, Chad Fowler is CTO of Wunderlist. As a leading voice on the topic of cloud-based deployment techniques, Chad coined the term "immutable infrastructure." Chad has been host and organizer of many technology conferences including the International Ruby Conference & Railsconf.

Norm Driskell is a public sector digital leader. He focuses on digital transformation, transparency, and open source. From his base in London, Norm founded the AWS UK User Group in 2012, with events every two months and sponsorship from leading tech and media companies.

Victor Oliveira is a founding partner of Concrete Solutions. As Director of Engineering for this Brazilian company, he runs Cloud Computing and Agile practices. Concrete Solutions was the first AWS Partner in Latin America, due in large part to Victor's efforts. Today he helps clients turn infrastructure in to code while also keeping a watchful eye out for optimizations that can reduce costs without sacrificing quality.

After leading technical operations at Pinterest, Ryan Park became Principal Engineer for Runscope. There, he leads the design and development effort for their AWS-powered debugging and testing service. Ryan speaks on the topic of application design and is a mentor for companies in the 500 Startups incubator.

As a founding member of the engineering team at Bizo (recently acquired by LinkedIn), Larry Ogrodnek began using AWS way back in 2008! He adopted additional AWS services as they came along, and enjoys shutting down homegrown alternatives in the process. Larry is the co-founder and organizer of the Advanced AWS Meetup Group in San Francisco.

Lynn Langit consults on big data and cloud architecture from her base in Southern California. She has designed production-quality AWS solutions and also delivers technical content (also related to AWS) at developer conferences all over the world. Lynn creates technical AWS screencasts and is the primary courseware author for Teaching Kids Programming.