My Journey Into AWS Community Builders: Learning, Sharing, and Growing

Last week I was thrilled to be accepted into the AWS Community Builders programme. For someone who has spent years working with AWS services—especially CDK and Amplify—this felt like the perfect opportunity to connect with other developers, share knowledge, and, most importantly, learn from those with more experience.

Finding My Place in the Community

I only joined yesterday, but the Slack community has already been a great source of insights. One particularly interesting discussion was about best practices for handling errors and dead letter queues in Lambdas consuming SQS messages—a great example of the depth of expertise here.

I’ve also enjoyed seeing posts around Lambda, meeting people from around the world, and being part of the serverless section of the community. For now, I’m focused on listening and learning, especially around MVP deployment, performance monitoring, and uncovering unknown unknowns.. It’s filled with like-minded people asking the right questions and offering even better answers.

What I Want to Learn

As someone who has built a lot on AWS CDK and Amplify, I’m particularly interested in:

• MVP Best Practices – How do others quickly deploy minimal viable products with AWS? What architectural decisions make the biggest impact early on?
• Metrics and Performance Monitoring – How do developers ensure their applications run smoothly, scale effectively, and stay cost-efficient?
• Reusable AWS Stacks – Can I create a pre-configured AWS CDK stack that follows best practices for a CRUD API Gateway and re-use it for different projects?
• Cost and Security Optimisation – Now that I work at BBC iPlayer Web, I see firsthand the importance of keeping cloud costs down while ensuring strong security. I’d love to take best practices from AWS Community Builders and apply them to improve efficiency at scale.

Looking Ahead

My goal isn’t just to absorb information—it’s also to bring value back to my team at BBC iPlayer. If I can pick up key insights from the AWS Community Builders programme, whether it’s cost-saving measures, better security practices, or automation techniques, I’ll be able to share tips and tricks that benefit everyone.

For now, I’m soaking it all in. But as I refine my understanding, I’d love to contribute back to the community—whether through blog posts like this, open-source contributions, or discussions in Slack.

If you’re also in AWS Community Builders (or just passionate about AWS), let’s connect! I’d love to hear how you approach these challenges and what strategies you’ve found useful.