My Experience at AWS Community Day Nepal

Introduction

The first ever AWS Community Day Nepal was held almost 1.5 years ago. I will share my experience of the event and observations that made today’s aws community presence.

AWS User Group Nepal

The AWS community of Nepal has an interesting backstory. Back in 2018, during my high school days, Facebook was widely popular among Nepali users. Meanwhile, I am no longer around Facebook anymore. At that time, I got involved with different tech communities around Facebook groups.

I still remember Anjani Phyual sharing the post/poll about the current status of cloud computing and its market overall in Nepal. Many audiences share their rants about how they cannot gain access of the public cloud. There was no AWS cloud community. It was that time period when Anjani Phyual initiated and led the AWS User Group Nepal with the motive to advocate AWS and its ecosystem.

While I have my own perspective on this. I understand that there may be different factors at play from the doer’s standpoint that influenced their actions.

AWS User Group Nepal is a community of AWS and cloud computing enthusiasts in Nepal. Before AWS User Group Nepal, I remember the job market status that only a few companies hired the tech role aligned with AWS. Azure/GCP was still there. Only a few companies adopted AWS. There were other communities as well I remember Developer’s Nepal (DN), early FOSS Nepal, Pentester Nepal, and so on. DevOps Kathmandu was formed during this time in 2018. If we talk about the overall public cloud market, it’s negligible. The initiation of AWS User Group Nepal immerses many AWS opportunities for students and tech professionals. Of course, this also impacted my career, I got the visibility of AWS while I was a student and became an AWS Community Builder.

AWS Community Day Nepal

Until the end of 2022, there were no AWS Community Day events in Nepal. Typically, we would have a virtual and onsite meetup. I heard the news that Community Day will take place for the first time in Nepal. I really wanted to take part in it and meet many folks whom I know online only. Eventually, I met them.

So What’s Community Day all about? Well, it’s a community-organized cloud education event with technical talks and showcases by knowledgeable AWS users. Such an event is worthwhile for anyone to get exposure and network with AWS industry practitioners. Anyone is eligible and encouraged here to participate despite not having a tech background or a Computer Science Degree.

The first-ever AWS Community Day Nepal was kicking off early in the morning. I was at the track 2 during the event. It was fun overall. We had keynote speaker Anjani Phyul, who expressed his gratitude to the community. Karan Desai also delivers the keynote session about the Security Controls on AWS. Kudos to him and his team for helping us to get support for the first-ever AWS DeepRacer competition. And AWS DeepRacer competition caught my attention. You let your car go in physical track. A winner was declared based on his Python code with the accuracy of RI(Reinforcement Learning) model. It allows you to get started with Reinforcement Learning in a fun way.

We had a session about becoming part of AWS User Group Nepal by Barsha Bhandari, the first female Community Builder. She shared her journey from volunteering to leading the community despite coming from a non-traditional tech background. I remember she shared her challenges and, the importance of unity of community and diversity. She quoted one thing “It takes one person to initiate community but takes community to handle more active and productive”. She shared the possibility of becoming anything despite any background, and why it’s important to be a part of the community.

Well, there were many other talks too that I enjoyed. Mentioning everyone here might be long over here. There were demos about chatbots using Lambda and EKS’s secret management using AWS Secret Manager during the talk. It was a great insight on this one. I noticed during this session, that there was a little bit of chaos from the audience that didn’t let to understand and focus more on the session. I expect hopefully in the upcoming event, we won’t get such an issue at all.

I also had an opportunity to represent there as a Community Builder [container] and shared my views in front of a large number of people.

Impact onwards

Later on, many of the speakers from the event were selected for community builder and AWS Ambassador. Female community Builder was also selected, which was a significant step towards promoting diversity and inclusivity in the community. It’s wonderful to hear that the AWS Cloud Club and Cloud Captain have been formed for Tribhuvan University. This let the presence of AWS at the academic level too. Decentralization of AWS User Group as meetup often occurs at the Kathmandu Valley only. Now it’s happening outside the valley too. Besides ongoing events, there was an initiation programme too.

AUG Nepal She can was one of them. It’s for the young mentee girls to begin their journey in cloud computing. It’s about breaking down the barriers that prevent women from succeeding in tech. I was also part of it as a mentor on securing internship and resume guideline one. I remember some mentees were able to get full-time jobs. These are the impacts I have observed after the AWS Community Day event.

Conclusion

The first-ever Community Day Nepal was successfully held in the Kathmandu Valley. Amazing experience. I also observed that participants were from the outside of the valley. Kudos to the organizing team, volunteers, speakers, and participants for pulling off the AWS event. Overall, I would like to give a rating of 9/10 for the event and its impact in general. You might be wondering are there any events in the future related to AWS in Nepal? There will be 2024 AWS Community Day that will kick off around April. Stay tuned with AWS User Group Nepal and their website acdnepal.

Personally, I love the swag: D. Thank you AWS Community Day Nepal.