It’s Never Too Late to re:Invent Yourself

From an Unemployed Lawyer to an AWS Community Hero

During the global financial crisis 7 years ago, I was an unemployed immigration lawyer. After a lot of soul searching I decided to leave the legal world and pursue a career in IT. Today I have the honour of being named as an Amazon Web Services community hero.

For me, this is the proudest moment of my career in cloud and it just goes to show that it is never too late to re:invent yourself!

I want to thank Adam McCarthy & Warren Jonas for hiring me at Rackspace to get me started. Darryn Trevelleion for helping me get through the interview & Steve Carroll for hiring me as a Solutions Architect 10 months later.

Mario Vlachakis, Bruce Brodie, Brian Moore, Matthew Parkins, Sean Pope & Craig Thomson for helping me develop in to a good Solutions Architect. Alex Wilmot and Ross Davenport for showing me that there is a bigger world outside of Rackspace.

I also want to thank the team at Logicworks for their fantastic support last year — one of the best companies I have ever worked for.

Special thanks to the team

A special thanks to the team at A Cloud Guru for putting up with everything was still in its infancy and helping to get us this far along. I also want to thank our awesome developers, Sam Kroonenburg and Pete Sbarski for making a serverless Learning Management System that is totally cutting edge.

But most of all, I want to thank my 140,000+ students.

Developing a career in IT can be hard work, but if you study hard and work hard it will eventually pay off! Thanks for all the feedback over the past couple of years. Cloud Gurus — I really do appreciate your passion and engagement on our forums helping others on their journey.

The Future of Cloud is Serverless

So where to from here? Well I truly believe the future of cloud is Serverless. A Cloud Guru is passionate about serverless, and we now host an incredible conference, designed great courses on serverless to help others get started, and offer masterclass hands-on workshops on serverless architecture for teams and corporations.

If you can’t make the conference, why not attend one of our meetups in London/Sydney/Melbourne/San Francisco or New York City?

Virtual Reality is here and is no longer science fiction

I also strongly believe the future of education lies in Virtual Reality and we are working hard to produce one of the world’s first serverless virtual reality learning management systems. If you are interested in hearing more (or investing!) drop me an email.

Become an Instructor

Finally we are always looking for new instructors on A Cloud Guru. If you are an AWS expert in a particular field and you feel that you could produce an excellent course, connect with me.

Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus!

A Cloud Guru

The mission of A Cloud Guru is to engage individuals in a journey to level-up their cloud computing skills by delivering the world’s leading educational content designed to evolve both mindsets and careers.

“Let no man in the world live in delusion. Without a Guru, none can cross over to the other shore.“ — Guru Nanak

Our courses are delivered by industry experts with a shared passion for cloud computing. We strive to serve our growing community of cloud gurus, who generously contribute their insights in our forums, workshops, meet-ups, and conferences.

Keep up with the A Cloud Guru crew @acloudguru.