In this episode, I caught up with Adam Elmore (@aeduhm), AWS DevTools Hero and an active member of the AWS community. We talked about how he passed all 12 AWS certifications in 2 weeks and how they have helped him find success on the AWS IQ platform. We also touched on his new project, public.dev, the general lack of performance-focused site builders, live streaming on Twitch and his plans for a new video course.
Links from the episode:
For more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow us on Twitter as @RealWorldSls and subscribe to this podcast.
To learn how to build production-ready serverless applications, check out my upcoming workshops.
Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
In this episode, I caught up with Adam Elmore (@aeduhm), AWS DevTools Hero and an active member of the AWS community. We talked about how he passed all 12 AWS certifications in 2 weeks and how they have helped him find success on the AWS IQ platform. We also touched on his new project, public.dev, the general lack of performance-focused site builders, live streaming on Twitch and his plans for a new video course.
Links from the episode:
For more stories about real-world use of serverless technologies, please follow us on Twitter as @RealWorldSls and subscribe to this podcast.
To learn how to build production-ready serverless applications, check out my upcoming workshops.
Opening theme song:
Cheery Monday by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3495-cheery-monday
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Yan Cui: 00:13
Hi, welcome back to another episode of Real World Serverless, a podcast where I speak with real world practitioners and get their stories from the trenches. Today, I'm joined by Adam Elmore. Hey man, long time no see.
Adam Elmore: 00:24
Hi, and yeah, it's been a while.
Yan Cui: 00:27
Yeah, I've been keeping track of what you've been doing. And you've done some really interesting stuff, which I can't wait to get into. But I guess that maybe before we get into that, can you just say a few words about yourself and what you've been up to?
Adam Elmore: 00:38
Yeah, so I am Adam Elmore. I'm from the Ozarks in the middle of the US. I'm an independent— I'm terrible with titles. I've worked for myself most of my career. So I've never really had a proper title. I'm an independent cloud engineer, I guess, architect. I don't know what I am. I mostly like building on AWS. I'm recently named an AWS DevTools Hero. And, yeah, recently, I mean, I'm sort of working. I do client work. So I build things for mostly startups. I had a startup for a few years. And now I mostly kind of consult for startups that are building on AWS. That's kind of what I'm up to.
Yan Cui: 01:16
Yeah, I guess, firstly, congratulations on the inclusion to the AWS Heroes program. It’s really well deserved.
Adam Elmore: 01:23
Oh, man, it's such an honor. I, I always kind of like wanted to become a hero. I thought someday, that was like a career goal. I was very surprised to find out that I was one. I don't know if I ever would have been surprised but definitely caught me off guard, very excited.
Yan Cui: 01:38
I think in putting out a lot of content in terms of the stuff you've been sharing on social media, but also in terms of your podcast, and lots of other things that you've been working on, and the products that you've been doing, which we're gonna get into in a minute, which I think you know, all those things are really good ways to share your experience with the wider community. I think I really love this whole trend of building in public and learning in public which I think is really good for everybody, not just for the person who are doing them. I think that the stuff that you've been sharing has been really inspiring to a lot of people I've spoken with. So I think it's definitely well-deserved heroes program.
Adam Elmore: 02:12
Yeah, I appreciate that. I actually, just in the last couple of weeks, I started streaming. So I'm like, I'm literally streaming my entire working days on Twitch, at least the last two weeks. And the plan is to keep doing it. So I'm definitely learning in public. If anyone has watched those streams, they will watch me basically just Google all day, how to do stuff. That's basically what I'm doing. I'm learning in public, I guess.
Yan Cui: 02:36
And I have to say, I'm a big admirer of the fact that you are really full stack, you're really comfortable with both the front end and the back end. I think the same goes to anybody else who is a true full stack developer, someone who is not just, you know, knows a lot of back end can dabble in the front end, or vice versa, but someone who's actually proficient in both. You know, I've just spent the last couple of days rebuilding the landing page for the AppSync master class from scratch using Vue and Tailwind CSS. And it's literally every five minutes or literally everything I do I have to Google how do I make a text appear in a center? How do I put them at the bottom of a container? It's just crazy how much stuff you learn, and then you forget, and then six months later, you get to relearn the whole thing again. And someone who can do both the front end and the back end, you have a lot more respect, man.
Adam Elmore: 03:26
Well, I think, yeah, I didn't intend to do that. Like, I don't think I ever set out thinking I want to learn all the different things. I think I've just always built stuff alone. Most of my career, I've kind of been on my own. And when you are, you sort of have to do all of it. So I think if I could, like choose to only build back-end stuff, I would probably not touch the front honestly. But like when you work by yourself, you don't have anybody else to sort of do that. So I've just kind of been stuck with it, I guess. But yeah, it's a lot of googling. It's like every time I center something in Tailwind, I have to read Google like is it justified in the center [03:54], I don't know. That's, it's never gonna stick at this point.
Yan Cui: 04:05
Yeah, I think CSS CSS is one of those things that, I don’t know, you just have to relearn every couple of months, because it's so easy to forget. There's so many different tricks. There's so many different little things that kind of gets in the way you forget to do one thing and behaves completely different. Yeah, it's one of the most difficult thing I've had to learn. I think Vue I can pick it up quite easily. It's quite easy to learn. React, I think I've had to learn it a few times. And within a few months, within a few weeks, I forget everything I learned. But I think Vue is a bit more persistent. I think it's a bit easier to remember to learn and use it. It'd be more approachable, at least for someone who is much more so focused on the backend as I am.
Adam Elmore: 04:44
Yeah, yeah, I mostly remember the things that I keep using like anytime I stopped using something it goes away very quickly.
Yan Cui: 04:51
And speaking about this whole rebuild I'm doing, the reason why I'm doing it is because I actually put my landing page on the Google page inside, and I wasn't happy with what I was kind of seeing coming back. I mean, the loading time, the time to first interaction, those all are much higher than I expect. The whole thing was, you know, it was running on WordPress, but I was using Shifter which gives you this like serverless WordPress thing. So you'll compile your WordPress to a static page, and then you will host it out of CloudFront. So it's supposed the reason it’s quite fast. But with a lot of the WordPress stuff, we just get so much stuff that is included in the headers, and there is just so much crap you have to download, so you're just not going to get very good performance. So I thought, Okay, I want to try Dark Mode. And so while I do that, I may just as well rebuild the whole thing. And it's just been really difficult. And I'm actually really surprised looking at a lot of the other tools out there. I've tried Wix as well, for some other things I've been I've done, the performance on those are also not good. And then that’s— and I remember something that you've been doing for a while, you've been building public.dev. And one of the things that you keep talking about is just how bad the performance of these tools are. And that's why you're building public.dev. So can you maybe share a bit some of the things that you've done so far, and what you've seen in terms of what your customers are doing, the results that they are seeing as well?
Adam Elmore: 06:15
Yeah, absolutely. So public.dev is like a, it's a personal site builder for developers. So if you're a developer, and you want to have your personal site up there on the web, but you don't necessarily want to do that from scratch, I know a lot of developers like to build their own. But if you maybe are a back-end developer, you don't have like a good design sense. Or you just don't want to take the time to sort of build out your portfolio. It's meant for those developers, so it's not for everybody. But for those developers, it's just a way to quickly stand up a good portfolio that's fast, you know, semi-attractive with some kind of basic customization or whatever. But when I set out to build it, I did sort of survey the landscape of site builders and found that they're really not performance. So most site builders, and I guess it, I guess it makes sense like, that the people who are using them just don't maybe care. But I think for developers, I know for me, I really care, like anything I put out there under my name, I want it to be fast, I want it to be like short of checking all the web dev boxes, like, I've tested it against, you know, LightSail, or whatever. LightSail is that AWS product, like light Lighthouse scores, I don't know. I want it to be like as fast as it can be, because it's sort of representing me, right? And I think all the like, there are so many site builders, and even just like products that that aren't their core product isn't a site builder. But like, tangentially, they need a site builder, because you're gonna like white label this product. So I think like some of the teaching, like when I'm setting out to build a course, and some of those products, they have to build a site for you to put your courses on it, right? Even those I find, like, they're just not checking those it's really fast boxes. And there was like one site builder, I think I found that they're really fast. But that was sort of the idea. It was like, I would love to just use some service to put my personal page up that I could quickly kind of like what you see is what you get, edit my personal site, and make it look good. But I just can't handle the like super slow time to first byte or time to interact, all those things that those site builders don't seem to check. So yeah, public, it builds you a site that it served, you know, from the CDN it's all static, but it's, it's the next JS site. So it's based on this concept like incremental static regeneration. So ISR where basically, like the data is kept up to date, you can have dynamic things on your personal site, like GitHub stars, or package downloads, that sort of stuff. Or if it's an RSS feed, like your latest blog entries, you can have that stuff on your personal site, and it's kept up to date, but your users, the people who are reviewing your personal page are always getting that cache site. So it rebuilds it sort of asynchronously in the background and puts newer versions of your site up on the on the CDN. So that's how Next.js, you know, works in terms of ISR. I don't think they invented that concept. But that's how they implement it. And then I guess I didn't like the idea of my personal site having React like it's a portfolio site I don't feel like it should be a full-fledged React app. So I sort of strip out like the personal sites that are built don't include React. So it's just a very simple HTML CSS page. It's progressively enhanced. So there's a little bit of JavaScript like six kilobyte JavaScript file that just does like link pre-loading, things like that. So I've really focused a tonne on making this sort of like precise website that is super fast for very, like discerning devs people who care about, you know, that kind of thing that if somebody inspects the network traffic on their personal site, they won't be like, Whoa, why are you downloading 25 megs of JavaScript or whatever? That was an exaggeration. But yeah, that's the idea with public. And so far, I think the users the people who are in it's a private beta right now. There are a couple of 100 devs that have built their sites with public. And the feedback has been good, like, they're people, you know, it's a lot of people in AWS community that they're into technology. They want to have their own personal site. They're developer, but they're not necessarily somebody likes to build websites, like, they mostly work with infrastructure, or DevOps, or whatever. So for that crowd, I think it checks that box pretty nicely.
Yan Cui: 10:19
Yeah, that kind of describes me as well. I've had the use of quite a few different website builders, for the various landing pages, I've had to build for my courses and workshops. And like you said, it's just the performance of those things. So once you start looking it’s just not pretty at all. It's really easy to get going and put something together. But then once it's out there, you kind of want it to load fast, which is going to help you with SEO and a whole bunch of other things as well. Certainly like you said, if it's something that you're going to share with the public, something that represents you, you kind of want it to be good, right, to be not just pretty, but also be fast. So that, you know, it looks good on you. So yeah, I'm really interested to see how this goes. And there's a pretty good chance that some of my landing pages kind of move over to public.dev at some point.
Adam Elmore: 11:05
Awesome. Yeah, I'd love that. No, it's, uh, I think the feedback has been good. I think, you know, that, there's still a lot I want to build out. And they're sort of like, I built it because I didn't like my personal site. And I wanted some easier way to manage it. But I sort of have this idea that it's to manage like your whole personal public sort of footprint, right? So like, I want to add blogging, and I want to add, you know, other things to manage all the places that you present yourself as a dev online. That's the idea. And that's why it's public dot dev, it's sort of your whole public representation on the web, trying to fix your whole online presence in one place. And I'm building it on Twitch if you want to come watch.
Yan Cui: 11:42
Yeah, yeah, I'm actually really surprised at what hour I see you go on Twitch, because it must be really late your time or really early your time. Because I wake up around 10, 11 o'clock over here in Europe. And I think about a couple of hours after I wake up, you're going on Twitch, I'm like, I swear, it's four o'clock in the morning his time.
Adam Elmore: 12:02
Yeah. No, I do. I start my my stream in the morning at four, I wake up around 3, 3:30. I've got every time I say this, I feel like people think I'm like one of those hustler types, or hustle culture or whatever. I don't like sleep too little. I just go to bed really early. We've got two young boys. And my wife and I have sort of worked out this arrangement where I go to bed really early because they go to bed early. And then I get up really early. And I'm able to work for four or five hours before they even wake up. So it just allows us more kind of time as a family later in the day. I can take off early. And yeah, it's sort of like schedule arbitrage within our family. But it does lead to like a lot of that. People don't understand why I'm working at the wee hours of the morning in the US or they think I live in Europe or something.
Yan Cui: 12:46
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And actually speaking about, I guess, work hours and getting a good work-life balance, I guess pivot to talk about some of the work that you've been doing as a consultant. One of the things that you mentioned to me in the past is that you've had some really good experience working with AWS IQ, which for those of you who haven't heard about it. It’s essentially like a marketplace where, as a consultant or expert, you can put yourself build a profile on AWS IQ. And then AWS customers who are looking for help with how to use Lambda or API Gateway, they're looking for some external help, they can go to AWS IQ and find certified professionals like Adam here, and then just basically contact him and ask for help. And I think AWS IQ, they had a thing where they stopped taking commissions a while back. I don’t know if that is still the case, but I think usually they take a few percentages, right? Is that right?
Adam Elmore: 13:38
Yeah, it used to be. So when I first started using IQ, maybe 18 months ago, it was something like 15% from the experts side. So you know, if you're a certified expert on AWS IQ, you're one of the people that people are trying to hire, they took 15% from yours. And I think they added 3% to the buyer side. So the AWS customer side. Now, the buyer side doesn't pay anything. So it's 0% on that side, and then it's 2.5% on the expert side. So they just completely gutted the fees and made it way more attractive, I think, to people like me.
Yan Cui: 14:10
Yeah, some of the things you've shared on the social media, and some of the numbers in terms of the number of clients you've worked with on AWS IQ, but also in terms of the revenue, you've been able to generate through those work has been really impressive. But at the same time, I think I've spoken with a few other people who are also working with clients via AWS IQ, but they've not had any anywhere near the level of success that you've had. And I think you mentioned that the fact that you've been doing really well is because you've got some crazy number of certificates. How many have you got now?
Adam Elmore: 14:41
So I've got 12 AWS certifications. I don't have the SAP one. But I have the Alexa skills builder which has been retired. So I have 12 which is the most they have right now. I just don't have SAP and I have an old retired one. Yeah, 12.
Yan Cui: 14:57
So basically, you've done all of the certification exams and you've qualified for pretty much every facet of cloud development on AWS imaginable. And so I guess it's not a big difference between you and somebody else who is also trying to make a living of AWS IQ is just the fact that on that platform, you've got customers coming to it with no, I guess preconception about who Adam Elmo is or who somebody else is. And the only way to gauge how good this person might be is by either the reviews they've had or the number of certifications they've had.
Adam Elmore: 15:31
Yeah, no, absolutely. So when I actually did all the certifications, and I didn't know about IQ, but once I got them all, I sort of applied and learned about this marketplace. And it turns out that on that marketplace when you sort of submit, you know, you want to be doing work for a customer that has requested, you know, for expert help, you put your name in the hat with a bunch of other people, and they display your name, your little avatar, and the number of certs, just a flat number. So mine will just say, I think it's 11 because they don't they don't count the— what's the first cert? The— before the associate levels, they don't count that one.
Yan Cui: 16:07
The developer practitioner? Is that the one?
Adam Elmore: 16:11
Yeah, cloud practitioner. So that one doesn't count toward IQ, but it just has that number next to my name, and everyone else, you know, has their number. And I, I swear to you, I've had customers tell me that they chose me because or they wanted to reach out to me because it was like, I had a really big number and the other person had three and like that was the reason that they wanted to talk with me. So I know, I know from conversations I've had with other people. And it's a friendly group in the expert community on IQ like there's a slack but I know from conversations with those people that they don't have quite the same experience. So I felt like if I wanted to work with a customer that showed up on IQ, I could sort of respond to them. And maybe 80% of the time, they'd want to get on a call or they'd follow up. And I know that's not the case with other folks that don't have as many certs. So I do think the certifications if you live in the UK, or France or the US and you can be an AWS IQ expert, that's a surefire way to sort of get yourself at least on a phone call, like it gets you that foot in the door, just because that number that catches their attention, the way they display it, even just on IQ. And then once you get on that conversation, I think if you can sort of hold a conversation with the customer. And if you enjoy talking with customers, I think those are the two main factors. So get as many certs you can. And if you enjoy talking with customers, I think you can do really well on AWS IQ. I think there's, there's a lot of noise, I mean, like any marketplace like that. There's a lot of people who maybe aren't great potential partners that you want to work with or even people that just don't realize that what IQ is, that people get sort of directed, they're thinking it's support. And so you have to filter through the like 95% of it, that's maybe noise. But then there's there's a good steady stream, you know, month to month of startups that they're not big enough to sort of have dedicated $15,000 a month AWS support with teams and everything else. But they have needs that sort of extend beyond their team like they don't internally have expertise building on AWS, and they know that that's what they want to do. I think that's where IQ is this this great marketplace for those types of customers. And you find one of those, and they can be a long term, you can I mean, I've built for six, eight months with customers that I've met on IQ. And that's just that's kind of the nature of it. It's you have to sort of watch it and see those customers come by. But once once you meet those people, and then the relationships just sort of build into other relationships with you know, word of mouth and things like that. Yeah, I love IQ. I think it's a it's a really great platform. And, and I try to sort of sing its praises every chance I get.
Yan Cui: 18:34
Yeah, I'm still waiting for it over here in the Netherlands for a while, and I'm still waiting. I saw them. They went live to UK a while back. But unfortunately, I was after I left the UK.
Adam Elmore: 18:46
I hope that speeds up like I know that they're trying to move it as global as they can on the expert side. I hope that they can start speeding that up maybe because they went that about two years, I think just in the US and then most recently added the UK and France. I hope to see that keep expanding because that's the one thing when I talk about it on Twitter, I feel like the AWS community and the Twitter community are so global. It's very hard to like tell people go sign up for IQ and most of them can't like if they're hearing what I'm saying.
Yan Cui: 19:15
Also, in terms of the kind of work you get from IQ is it mostly consulting, I guess, advisory type of work? Or do you get a mix of advisory as well as, Adam, can you come and help us build this app? We got this idea. But we we can't hire someone to do or we can't afford an agency like Accenture or one of these big companies that's going to charge you a boatload of money to build something really simple. Can you come and help us especially you've been full, quite full stack, build a front-end mobile app as well as the back end?
Adam Elmore: 19:46
Yeah, it's it's a mixed bag. And I would say because I mean, these people on the other end, the customers that are AWS customers, they're also building, you know, front end applications. And they don't necessarily come into it thinking oh, this this person is just going to help me with my AWS stuff. If you let them, they will let you come in and build whatever. So early on, like these days, I don't do a lot of work on IQ. And I'll talk about that. But early on, when I first got into IQ, I made the mistake of sort of agreeing to whatever people want to, you know, help with. And I am a full-stack developer. I have that background. And it was sort of like, Hey, you want to build a full stack SAS web application? I could do that. That didn't turn out as well, generally, for me. It just, it's like harder to sort of set good boundaries. And the scope is harder to contain when there's a front end. And people have opinions about how front end should operate and those sort of things. So I learned pretty quickly after a few months that I wanted to sort of avoid that work, but it is available. I mean, you can find small businesses on AWS IQ you find funded startups. And you can sort of find that opportunity to build front-end web stuff if you want it. But I've learned, I'm more comfortable. I think from a consulting standpoint, if someone's gonna pay me to do work, I'd much prefer to build out cloud infrastructure where there's just fewer like nobody, there's no like, I want that button to look different cloud stuff like there's just no parallel to that. And I've not had a good experience, sort of drawing good boundaries and lines around what the scope is for a web application. And there's mobile. There's been mobile applications. I've done work on that front. And yeah, I just, I much prefer to stick to back-end stuff these days.
Yan Cui: 21:28
Yeah, like things like what colour the buttons are, and really small, tiny little things that if you want to tweak,
Adam Elmore: 21:34
Yeah, there's a lot of back and forth. Like when you build a front end for somebody, there's just no way to like, get it all right together. Like when you're trying to define the scope for a project, it's just very hard with a web application to sort of get it all nailed down upfront. And it's worked so much better for me to sort of work that way in third party or in consulting relationships, where I do sort of fixed costs, fixed scope, here's what I'm gonna build you, this is what it costs, it's just a lot harder to do that with web applications. And if I have any say in it moving forward, I try to avoid other people paying me to build front-end stuff.
Yan Cui: 22:08
That's such a range thing because that's also what I prefer to do as well in terms of how I charge and work with clients fixed price with a fixed scope. But like you says, I also struggle with sometimes the scope creep. So always have to build in some buffer into their fixed price. So that, you know, within certain amount of flexibility, I'm going to have to give the customer that we should be able to change certain things, but just not entirely new features that just wasn't discussed and priced into the fixed price.
Adam Elmore: 22:37
Yep, I feel like I've read some of your stuff, maybe like blog articles about you've written some like full stack, like AppSync based applications for people, right? Is that an experience we share in common with consulting,
Yan Cui: 22:50
For consulting stuff, I only do the back end really clear about, you know, I'm not a front end developer, at least not a good one. And I shouldn't be doing that for you. If you want something that's gonna work, well. But yeah, I've been building, I guess, I've been the backend team for a few of my clients and building the entire back-end infrastructure for them on AWS. And that's where I'm good at and where I'm happy as well. But for the AppSync masterclass, that's why I partner with Gerard Sans. And he's been doing the front-end stuff. I kind of built the early prototype demo. It kind of works. It looks about right. But you know, he's not doing all these. He is not following all the front-end best practices. He is not progressive, you know, if you resize to the mobile, everything's gonna look wrong. So he's—
Adam Elmore: 23:37
So much stuff on the front end. I think front end is harder personally. I mean, I know I'm a back end developer. So maybe we say that because that's what we're more comfortable with. I just think like a lot of people I see on Twitter, like, want to, if they're like a back-end oriented dev, they want to say things like front end, yea, designing buttons and stuff. There's so much that goes on with state management and accessibility and responsiveness like just getting things right from a design perspective. It's so much harder on the front end in my opinion.
Yan Cui: 24:06
Absolutely. It's not just the code you're writing. But also, there's a lot of small subtle things you have to do in terms of, you know, the things that I struggle with, you know, like the styling all that. That's probably not where the front-end developers normally struggle with. Because if you look at some front-end code, there's a lot of complexities around the state management. I mean, on the back end, we kind of take for granted that we've got these microservices. You know, we've learned how to decompose a large problem into smaller ones. On the front end that is still in the infancy. You still just have micro front-end, and that's just kind of people are still working out how to do it.
Adam Elmore: 24:39
Yeah. If it's even a good idea.
Yan Cui: 24:41
Yeah. And if it's a good idea, because otherwise, you've got this big application, this huge monolith. With so many things happening, you got to know, you got synchronous process, you have to keep track of, you have to worry about user doing stuff at the wrong time. You have to worry about asynchronous processes, updating data in the background. There's a lot of things you got to think about all at once. And you have to do them all in one codebase, one repo. There's no easy way to decouple them and decompose them into smaller chunks. So front-end code is a lot more complicated and complex than the back-end code, I think,
Adam Elmore: 25:11
Yeah, I started streaming. And I thought, like, Oh, I'm gonna be able to stream like building out all these cool, you know, back end APIs with AppSync or whatever, building stuff with Dynamo. And I spent like 15 minutes building something on the back end, and then I have to spend like eight hours building the front end for it. And I realised my whole stream is just me like fiddling with Tailwind classes. And that's not probably what people are there for. But I don't know how to avoid it and stuff.
Yan Cui: 25:34
You just described my last two days spending many, many hours just fiddling with Tailwind, okay, that doesn't look quite right. Let's make the text a bit bigger. The colors are not quite consistent with the previous bit.
Adam Elmore: 25:46
But it's fun.
Yan Cui: 25:47
It's fun. I have to say, it's also quite satisfying that you get the really instant feedback compared to a lot of the time at the back end looking at logs. You kind of looking at logs, that's kind of the output that you're working with while on the front end, everything's very visual, very reactive. You get instant feedback and instant gratification as well, which I do like about that, compared to what I do on the back end.
Adam Elmore: 26:08
Yeah, and I even do enjoy front-end development. I make fun of like the process a lot, the hustler I am. But like I just don't want to do it for customers. I don't want people to pay me for doing front-end work. So I feel like I'm too slow. And it's not good use of anyone's resources. But when it's my own projects, I probably enjoy working on the front end more. It's sort of a love-hate relationship like I know I'm slow, I know, there's probably people that could do what I'm doing much faster and with much less pain. But something about it is enjoyable. I don't know if it is that just like save the file, see the change. Something about it I can't stop doing it. So should stop saying I want to I guess.
Yan Cui: 26:45
So you mentioned just now that you're moving away from AWS IQ. So why is that? Is something not working out for you?
Adam Elmore: 26:53
Oh, no, yeah. So I think I've seen this pattern on IQ, where people have asked me because I sort of have said a few times in various contexts that I think more people, more experts should sign up like get some certifications. I think it's clear blueprint. If you live in one of those countries to like, go out, get these certifications as many as you can even just 5, 6, 7 I think you differentiate pretty quickly, and then go and get on the platform and try it out. And I think there's this pretty clear path to sort of like make a pretty good living working from home working independently. And one of the things that people come back to me with is what if everyone starts doing that, then there's just too many experts, there's not enough, there's not going to be enough work going around. And what I found is, I used IQ really heavily for maybe four or five months. And then from there, you have like existing relationships. So people you start working with early in IQ you maybe continue working with. And those relationships can last for months and months beyond the time that you were actually on IQ looking for work. What I found is I've looked at expert profiles, you look at the review histories, very few are like active for long periods of time. I think you kind of get a few good clients on IQ, and that gets you going. And then from there, you don't necessarily need it as much, you don't need that new stream of work. So for me, now, I get a lot of my work from Twitter, which is kind of weird. I mean, it's strange, because that's like the only place I hang out online and when all of your clients are on Twitter, and they're following you, because that's how they found you. It just makes it a little weird to talk about your work. But you kind of you do you develop these other channels where you're finding customers that have problems that they think you can solve. And I think that's the thing, I still love IQ, I just haven't had to be on it for several months, because I've sort of did pretty well with it for a while, and then you know, you do really well you kind of take some time and you you can slow it down a little bit. And then I started finding, you know, people were reaching out to me. I think that's kind of the pattern, it's not so much a problem with IQ. It's just the nature of once you have success on it, you'll probably find you don't need it. And that's why I think it's so good for the new entrants. It's like you're coming in and people are passing the baton, you know, there's, there's more customers that need work. And experts are sort of graduating out of it. But it's nice even now, knowing that it's there like it helps me. You know, I don't have that psychology where I'm worried about finding work because I know there's this sort of like infinite legion that is IQ. And if I ever needed to find new work, I could get on there and start sort of putting my name in the hat and eventually find something. So yeah, I love it. I think I just it's kind of the nature of being on IQ is that you'll maybe eventually not need it.
Yan Cui: 29:33
And also think there'll be if IQ doing well for both their customers as well as for experts. This can only be good for everybody if the market continues to evolve and to get more people on board so that the experts can more easily find work and the customer can more easily find the help they need. Because there's a lot of customers who are looking for help. A lot of them, they just don't know where to go to look for those help. And oftentimes I get I get works like you through Twitter, through LinkedIn. People just asked me on social platforms, hey, I've got this problem. I don't know where to find help from. Can you help me out? Yeah, it's, it's definitely something that I love to see grow even bigger and hopefully reach out to more continents and countries.
Adam Elmore: 30:14
Yeah, that's the other side of it like the expert tool doesn't seem to just continue to grow. So if you're a new expert coming in, you didn't miss the boat. But then also, there just should be more and more customers on IQ all the time. I think as AWS gets better at directing the right customers to IQ, you're just gonna see that grow, but not to mention like AWS continuing to grow. So as more and more startups are choosing AWS or more and more small businesses are building on AWS, like you've got this growing pool of AWS customers, and hopefully, AWS just continues to get better at driving the right ones to IQ and sort of filtering out you know, the people who just need support help, I think, yeah, the trends should just be more and more good work in good pairings on IQ between customers and experts. I'm bullish on the platform.
Yan Cui: 31:00
So going back to 12 certificates, what's your tip for learning? Also how to pass those certification exams?
Adam Elmore: 31:09
Yeah, so this is a topic that my answer is way more nuanced than I've ever probably spent the time to lay out. So I'm going to try and lay it all out here. I've said in various settings, that I almost did all the certifications as like a parlour trick, like I didn't set out doing the certs for probably the right reasons or the reasons most people take certifications. I view them as, well, I was really into AWS. So I've been building on AWS for six, seven years when I first took the certs. And I thought one it'll help me sort of validate what I know about AWS and what I think I know. It'll help me fill in all the gaps where I just wasn't aware of stuff. That was my assumption it turned out to be very false, and I'll go into that. But it turned out that I knew very little about AWS. And for most of those certs, I actually did have to prepare heavily because it was stuff I didn't use, you know, I mostly built with serverless technology and the 12 certifications don't really touch serverless concepts that much so it's a lot more like traditional workloads on AWS, you know, EC2 and living in a VPC and then as you get into the specialties, you get into more like niche services that I just had never used. So in terms of preparing for them, I was going at it with this like speed run mentality. So I wanted to get all 12 as fast as I possibly could. And that ended up being about six weeks. So that's two a week for six weeks. I was preparing in ways that probably I wouldn't recommend other people to prepare. So I'm an auditory learner. I learn by listening, which makes like lectures, podcasts, audiobooks, really great for me. I can speed them up, like if it's on a platform where I can run it at two times or two and a half times speed. I can blow through some video content even like I first signed up for the associates with A Cloud Guru. And I think I did all the three associates with my seven-day free trial on A Cloud Guru. So I just listened to like the entire courses for all three of them over a few days in a week. And I have that sort of unique ability to do. I don't think that's normal. I don't think most people should try sitting for 10 hours at a time and listening to stuff at two times speed. But that that's how I really liked that like I really enjoy just sort of like washing information over me. So I prepared in kind of unusual ways. I'd say like mostly listening to content really fast and then just relying on experience. So I did have a lot of experience building on AWS, a lot of the high-level concepts and services. They sort of like, you know, made sense to me. And I could kind of, I understood places where AWS rhymes and where you can kind of fill in the gaps. But also I'm just a good test taker. And this is why like I feel like all of my experiences with certifications are super weird and not generally applicable to people that maybe are interested in certs for the right reasons, which are like it could open doors for you. IQ is a good reason in my mind like why I got them and I'm glad I got them for IQ sake. But I've never like applied for a job with certifications. I don't know how much weight they have when it comes to hiring. I don't know. I learned some things I don't use a lot of the knowledge I learned from the certifications, because again, it's services I mostly don't use, there's not a serverless certification path yet, which I think is coming which is great. Yeah, so it was sort of like this parlour trick. I have mixed feelings about the value of certifications. I've never really been someone that thought certifications were like this really valuable thing to put on your resume or whatever. But I'm super like weird in that I've never worked a normal job in my life. I was a lifeguard in high school. And then since then I've worked for myself. So I haven't had a traditional career and that sense when you work for yourself, you don't really have a resume. You don't really apply for jobs. And in that sense, I don't know the weight of certifications. And that's most of what people are interested in I think. So yeah, I did them for weird reasons, mostly just to see how fast I could do them ended up benefiting me greatly in the IQ front and I did learn a lot, but it was a fun process for me I guess, like going through the learnings and getting prepared. I just love the like preparation leading up to a test. I love the nerves that morning. I took the tests all early in the morning when I wake up at three or four. I love like the— my wife makes fun of me because I genuinely enjoy that like nervous feeling before the test starts and then like the pressure of the test something about the whole thing I get like a high and that's not a good reason probably to like for me to tell people to take the certifications. I don't feel like I have good advice. I don't know if other people should take them because that's something people ask me a lot because I have all the certifications is like, well, should I go get them? I don't know. I honestly have no idea. I just don't know what the weight of certifications are within the industry.
Yan Cui: 35:53
I think as someone who's done a lot of recruitment in my previous jobs we don't really look here certifications very highly. As you mentioned a lot of times they cover such a broad range of topics. They oftentimes are covering things that's not going to be useful but then the portion that is actually applicable to your day to day responsibilities are probably really small. You can't really judge based on whether or not someone holds a certification. But I think from the IQ point of view is definitely useful because as a differentiator compared to other candidates on the IQ. But I do think if you're new to AWS, someone who hasn't had much actual professional experience, this can still be a really good way to learn about AWS and also to get some, at least some proof that at least you're interested in AWS that for a potential employer that hey, I know I haven't got any commercial experience using AWS. But hey, look, I've been learning. I've been I can prove the fact that I've been learning and also I got certifications to kind of show for my efforts. So as a employer, at least I look at that and I see okay, this person at least is keen and he's not just— because everybody tells you, you know, they're a fast learner. There's not a single candidate I've ever interviewed that would say, Yeah, I'm a slow learner. But oftentimes, people just can't give me examples for things that they have learned, and especially someone who's applying for a role where he's going to be very heavy on AWS and cloud trying to show me that the fact that you are actually keen on the things we're going to be using. If you haven't got hands-on experience already, having certifications can just add a proof that hey, at least you're you're keen, at least you're doing something about the fact that you're lacking commercial experience. But other than that, for people who has been working with AWS, I don't think it's that important that whether or not you have to certifications.
Adam Elmore: 37:37
Yeah, it's super mixed feelings for me because on the one hand, I feel like the fact that I did them so fast was almost like sort of prove it like just proving how you can gain them and the bad side of certifications like I have 12 certifications does that mean because I spent those six weeks head down doing that, that I suddenly know so many things, like that sort of like is the bad side of certifications that they are there are multiple choice tests at the end of the day, and you can gain that, right? But on the other hand, I know you know the folks on the team, the certifications and training team. I've met with them. They're fantastic folks that are really passionate about laying out the best educational materials possible to teach people AWS. And that side of it, I think if you're doing it for your own learning adventure. If you know it's going to force you because you want to prepare for that test. You want to pass that test. It's going to force you to learn stuff that you're interested in learning. I think for that reason, it's great. I just I know most people ask about certifications from a future job prospects standpoint, and that's where I feel like I have no evidence to say, I'm just standing on shaky ground like I can't tell you, it's going to be a great thing for your career. I can tell you, you're going to learn stuff and that the AWS training and serverless team has put together a lot of great materials. Doing that tests and forcing yourself to learn that stuff, you'll see benefits for that reason, just maybe lower your expectations in terms of what it will do for your career, your job prospects.
Yan Cui: 38:58
So speaking about learning AWS and teaching people AWS, you've got a new course coming up though. Can you tell us about that?
Adam Elmore: 39:04
Yeah. So I sort of live in two worlds. And there are other folks like this I think where like on Twitter I'm half like one foot in the like modern web dev community. So people who get really bothered about like Time To First Byte and the latest whatever front end framework or the latest JavaScript runtime like I live in that sphere on, you know, Twitter, and just in my interests, like I do find myself very interested in web technology and building for the web, but then also AWS, and sort of building out infrastructure. And I've seen what AWS has sort of opened me up to as someone who you know, as a former web developer, AWS has opened a tonne of doors for me. And it's just been a lot of fun to learn this stuff that was pretty foreign to me at the beginning of my career. So I guess like I have this passion now to try. I'll talk about the challenges here to try to bring more web developers into this world and sort of expose them to going beyond like next js API routes. I think, a lot of front-end developers sort of think the back end is serverless functions now that's what they've learned, and that they have available to them. They can deploy their thing themselves. And I'm trying to say like for, not for everybody, but for some web developers, there's value in going beyond that and seeing what other tools you can open up in your career and just even for your own self building things like adding more tools to that tool belt, right? So building on, you know, AppSync or API Gateway, building with these AWS primitives that can really extend what you're able to build for the web. So that's my passion. That's what I'm really excited about teaching other web developers. The challenges I'm learning are I have a hard time convincing myself even sometimes the way I build applications is like a good general approach for most developers. So I mostly build on AppSync. And I love your masterclass, by the way. I mostly build like, I write VTL resolvers. And I do DynamoDB even is a pretty big barrier for web developers. I've found that like the way I build applications with AWS and in full stack even the way I incorporate it all into one solution is pretty niche. And the challenge I'm having now is saying, How do I introduce these concepts and AWS as a concept to web developers who have been pretty averse to it? How do I introduce it without just completely overwhelming them? Because, you know, trying to teach Dynamo is like a whole nother thing. Maybe they have exposure to SQL databases, and they know how to work with a SQL database. And if you're trying to introduce Dynamo which I think is a really great way to build on AWS, you know, serverless applications. It's just one more thing that it's like, I want to just point people at Alex's book and be like, here's the DynamoDB book, read that, and then we'll start talking. Because it just feels like there's these huge mountains that are in the way of sort of delivering the message I'm trying to deliver. So I'm kind of in the process like I'm hoping to release the course in the fall. I'm in the process of figuring out that scope and sort of how far do I take this because everything I'm passionate about and everything I like to build with is not necessarily the best way, and particularly with web developers who don't have the years of context that I have, I guess at this point. Yeah, it's a fun challenge. I mean, you've done the course thing so I'm sure you know what lies ahead for me, but I'm just kind of in the early stages.
Yan Cui: 42:25
It's a lot of work. So I can say, but I think there is a massive market of and probably slightly underserved market of, like you said, front-end developers who want to learn how to build applications on AWS and there's a lot of like getting started tutorials and things like that, that doesn't really go into a lot of depth. And that's why I kind of did that AppSync masterclass. But at the same time, I know that, hey, I'm not a front-end developer, I don't think in the same way as they do. And I'm gonna make assumptions that are probably not true if I target that market. So the kind of students I kind of look at is someone who's already been doing most of the backend stuff, at least have a basic understanding of AWS. So they're not really relying on me to teach them everything about DynamoDB. But I'm kind of showing them how to put everything together and how to do this. For most of my courses I tend to pivot on the production side of things, how to do the operational side of things, how to do monitoring and observability. That is the kind of the thing that I tend to focus a lot, because, you know, that's kind of the area where I think I can add a lot of value because I have been doing back end my entire career and most of that is on AWS. And I spent a lot of time dealing with production issues and how to figure out what’s going on. So that's where I see myself adding a lot of value, but at the same time, I know a lot of people who just want to get into the door, and their background is not in cloud, is not in AWS so they struggle to understand a lot of basic concepts. And that's why I see, I think it was Jack Ellis. He did a really good course on the Laravel. I think he is using a framework that lets you run Laravel on Lambda, and he's kind of teaching people from the PHP background, hey, you know, your PHP code doesn't have to just run on some dusty old server anymore. You can apply the same code that you used to, but then have them run in Lambda in this modern compute platform that's gonna give you all the scalability and cost savings, all that good stuff, and then just have the cake and eat it too. You see a lot of pockets of these kinds of communities that has been underserved almost by the Lambda platform itself in terms of really good support for their language, but also in terms of a lot of the educational materials out there. So I'm really interested to see what you come up with in terms of your curriculum and how you approach a course. So I'm definitely looking forward to seeing your course in action.
Adam Elmore: 44:41
Yeah, no, I think you've nailed it too, in terms of like, just some feedback as one of your students. You know, I was somebody who's building with AppSync, but I'd never felt like I was probably doing things the right way. And to your point, observability and monitoring and just the productionisation of an application. I felt very in the dark. So that was why I signed up for the AppSync masterclass. I mean, that was like I am an AppSync developer, I want to move deeper in sort of make sure I’m takng advantage of this service in the best way. I think what you said about Jack's course, that's much more in line with what I'm trying to do it. I'm trying to sort of take people who don't have a diverse experience, and guide them into this world that I think can open doors for them. It's not for every web dev like, but I think there are there's a subset of web devs who could open up just doors in terms of career like they might want to start moving more into DevOps or more into you know, building on AWS. That's kind of what I'm trying to do but it's it is tough because you're sort of trying to sell this whole idea of why bother like you're trying to take them from their happy life building on the web to this whole new world. And everyone knows that you know, there are 200 AWS services, and it's like, overwhelming and all these things. So you have to kind of contend with all that. So yeah, it's a challenge. We'll see. We'll see how it goes. I'm glad you're gonna be watching there kind of over my shoulder looking out for what I do.
Yan Cui: 45:58
Yeah, it's a really interesting challenge, but also there's gonna be a massive upside as well because you think how many web developers are out there, how big that particular market segment is. So if you can sufficiently address that market segment then this is a massive opportunity for you. I mean, look at what people like Kent Dodds and others have done with their React courses and the number of students they are able to teach globally. The numbers are just mind-boggling and the exposure. Every single one of those guys might be a potential student for something like this where you're teaching them not just how to write the front end but also showing them that running the backend is actually a lot easier nowadays compared to what it was maybe five, ten years ago. So you don't have to learn all this networking stack which takes an entire degree to understand how packet goes from one place to another. You can now just write some business logic and then let AWS do the dirty work do the difficult work which nobody cares about until stuff breaks anyway.
Adam Elmore: 46:55
Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's the pitch. I mean, like most developers are still on the web. They're used to these kind of like proven patterns for deploying applications to the web and these frameworks like Ruby on Rails or layer though, that sort of like, you build them a certain way. And I guess I'm trying to like give them a peek and behind the curtain of this whole new way, you know, of building applications. I believe it’s the future in terms of serverless on AWS. Yeah, it's... You know, I had a lot of questions like, if you put a lot of stuff out there, as you know, in the world, you get a lot of DMs and a lot of people reaching out just about various things. And one of the themes is like people who, because I do kind of interact with the web community. These people who, they've been this sort of web developer at their job for a long time, but they've been interested in the people over there that do the DevOps stuff, and they'd kind of like to know, what is that world and how do you get into it. I think that's the sort of secondary target of mine like I'm trying to help those people. I'm trying to answer those questions, how do you sort of branch into into AWS as a web developer? We'll see. Yeah, it's a big challenge, but I'm really excited about it. So it's something I'm pretty passionate about. I think that helps. I tend to stick with stuff and work on it when I'm really passionate about it. So…
Yan Cui: 48:11
Yep, that always helps. Yeah, best of luck. I really look forward to what you come up with.
Adam Elmore: 48:15
Yeah, thanks. Appreciate that.
Yan Cui: 48:17
So we are almost at the top of the hour. This has been great. I've really enjoyed having this conversation. Before we go. Is there anything else that you'd like to share maybe like upcoming projects or other things that you would like to tell the audience?
Adam Elmore: 48:29
I don't think so. I guess like, if you hear this and you have ever been on Twitch, I'd love to see you on Twitch. That's where I'm spending my entire days lately. It's just like streaming my entire workday on Twitch. So I'd love to see you there. I'd love to see anyone at re:Invent. So I'm making my one trip for the year this fall. I'll be in re:Invent in Las Vegas for re:Invent so. Yeah, that's all I've got to guess.
Yan Cui: 48:53
Okay, so if you want to see Adam work live on Twitch then you'll find the link in the description below. But otherwise, it has been a pleasure having you on here, Adam.
Adam Elmore: 49:02
Thanks so much for having me.
Yan Cui: 49:04
Take it easy, man. Okay, bye bye.
Adam Elmore: 49:05
You too.
Yan Cui: 49:06
So that's it for another episode of Real World Serverless. To access the show notes, please go to realworldserverless.com. If you want to learn how to build production-ready serverless applications, please check out my upcoming courses at productionreadyserverless.com. And I'll see you guys next time.