Talks
On stage and on air.
AWS re:Invent sessions, community tech talks, and podcast conversations. Each one is a juggling act in a different costume.
Upcoming (1)
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9 May 2026
AWS Community Day Istanbul 2026
AWS Community Day Istanbul - Istanbul, Turkey
Talk and juggling performance at AWS Community Day Istanbul. Bringing the pattern together - cloud, community, and keeping things in the air.
TechChange
Past (5)
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4 March 2025
AWS Hero: Juggling Cloud, Community & Performance
AWS Developers Podcast
A conversation about the through-line between juggling, cloud architecture, and community building - and why all three are the same job in different costumes. What it means to be an AWS Hero who actually juggles.
BrainTechChange RecordingThe juggling connection
This is the one where juggling is the topic, not just the metaphor. The conversation follows the thread from physical pattern-training through to how the same mental model applies when you're architecting distributed systems or building a developer community from scratch.
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3 December 2024
Build Amazon Q Apps to Scale & Drive Community Engagement (DEV201)
AWS re:Invent 2024 - Las Vegas, United States
The official AWS re:Invent 2024 session DEV201 - a deep-dive into building Amazon Q Apps that scale and drive community engagement, recorded live in Las Vegas.
The juggling connection
Building an AI app that stays useful at scale is the same problem as juggling more props than feels comfortable. The pattern has to be simpler than the output looks. Every agent in the system is another ball in the air - drop one and the cascade breaks. The session is about designing for that: knowing which ball demands your attention and which one is mid-arc and fine.
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12 November 2024
Build Amazon Q Apps to Scale & Drive Community Engagement
vBrownBag TechSession
A vBrownBag deep-dive into building Amazon Q Apps - how to design them for scale, where community engagement fits, and the patterns that hold up once you're past the demo. The patterns that hold up once you're past the demo are the same ones that hold up past the first five throws.
TechChange RecordingThe juggling connection
A demo that works once is a trick. A system that works for a thousand users is a juggling pattern - repeatable, learnable, and forgiving of small variations. This session is the workshop version of re:Invent DEV201: working through the pattern slowly before speeding it up.
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20 August 2024
Entrepreneurship & Leadership in the Tech Community
Level Up with Ahmed - Episode 3
A long conversation about building a tech career across continents, leading community programmes, and the unglamorous parts of becoming a voice in a noisy industry. What leadership actually looks like when you're not on stage.
Change RecordingThe juggling connection
The unglamorous part of leadership is the same as the unglamorous part of juggling: most of the time you're just doing the reps. The visible performance is a small fraction of the actual work. This conversation gets into what the reps look like - the community building, the career pivots, the 'I don't know' moments that don't make it onto the highlight reel.
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5 December 2023
AWS Hero at re:Invent 2023 - Community, Cloud, and What Comes Next
vBrownBag at AWS re:Invent 2023 - Las Vegas, United States
Joining the vBrownBag crew at re:Invent 2023 to talk about the year as a freshly-named AWS Hero - what the community looks like from the inside, how to keep contributing without dropping the rest of your life, and where cloud builders are heading next.
The juggling connection
The AWS Hero programme is about what you can keep in the air at once - technical depth, community contribution, visibility, your actual job. The question isn't how to balance them. It's how to build a pattern where each one feeds the next, the way a good juggling routine makes the next throw easier, not harder.