So you want to be a Serverless Developer?

Serverless is still very shiny but the landscape has certainly got greener over the past 2 years! If you have ever wanted to get started with Serverless but weren't sure how? Come along and listen to my key learnings from the past 7 years of building with Serverless and accelerate your way to the serverless cloud!

Silence the Noise! Embrace Wide Events!

Logging is one of those tools that can either help us solve a mysterious issue, or make us scratch our head relentlessly. In the early days, we would connect to a single server, sift through access logs, and hope enough debugging information would be available to help us crack the challenge.

Today, connecting to hundreds, thousands of servers, and reading a gazillion logs would be considered a "crime", if ever possible, in the Cloud we know today. Add Cloud functions in the mix, API integrations left and right, and before you know it you've become a thriller detective.

There's a better way! In this talk, you will learn logging strategies to find exactly what you need. We'll go through structured and canonical logging, and how "Wide Events" will save the day when you try to correlate transactions across multiple services.

Serverless Best practise

Best practices for building Serverless are still emerging, and the true way is not yet out there for all to follow. This talk will explore the layers of best practices and take you on a journey to the one true Serverless Best practice we should all start with from day one.

The Serverless landscape on AWS is riddled with opinion and frameworks - all of which are touted as the best one to use - this fracture within the community does not help anyone. This talk will take a journey through the current best practices at various solution layers within the serverless landscape and then bring it all back to the one true best practice everyone should be adopting from the get-go of working with Serverless. This is not about framework wars, language comparisons or how to build AWS lambda code at scale - this is about exposing the true list of considerations for starting out on a serverless journey and a pragmatic look at where you should start and the pro's con's to be considered - Architecture first, not code first! And of course, the real best practice for your project? ..... well it depends!

Improve Serverless Testing with Better Architecture

We all struggle to get our heads around testing Serverless Architectures - mainly because they are distributed and, in many cases, asynchronous. We also struggle because, on our journey to Serverless, we have focused on managed services and have forgotten about good Software Architecture. In this talk, I present SOLID Software Architecture ideas and strategies for breaking down your automated tests so that developers can move faster and get going easier and hopefully de-mystify the process of Testing your Serverless Systems.

How AWS Lambda Powertools enable Serverless teams to move fast with safety

An introduction to AWS Lambda Powertools for python showcasing the developer experience and how it simplifies writing code for processing Lambda events and provides developer guardrails for Instant success at scale
Ref Jones / AWS CB

Serverless Scalability Unleashed

You’ve built your application, deployed it with ease, and it’s humming along. As your user base grows and event volumes soar, soon you see performance bottlenecks, throttling, and chaos.

This session prepares you for those invisible barriers. Drawing from my experience using AWS Lambda to build high-scale, event-driven systems, explore a real system failure and hear practical strategies and patterns to help you overcome scalability challenges.

Whether you’re building greenfield applications or optimising existing systems, leave this session with the knowledge and confidence to unleash your serverless scalability.

Presented at re: Invent 2024 and Serverless Days ANZ (New Zealand) 2024

Serverless: Not just for startups?

Panel discussion
Hear from some of the most experienced minds around the business Value of Serverless. This is a leadership session targeted at getting buy in for the serverless mindset in the enterprise.

Maximise your VIBE with Powertools and Amazon Q Developer

"The hottest new programming language is English", but what happens when AI gives you code that works but isn't what you'd actually write?

I started frustrated with generic AI-generated serverless code and ended up discovering something that completely changed how I work with AI assistants. Through live demos, you'll see why "vibe coding" might be holding back your projects - and what comes next.

Walk away with a new perspective on AI pair programming and practical tools to level up your development workflow immediately.

Presented at AWS Summit Sydney 2025 in Dev Lounge as a lightning talk (20 minutes)

Flowgramming with AI: Live Coding with Agentic Assistants

What if coding with AI could be more than just better autocomplete? This live coding session introduces "flowgramming" - a specification-driven development approach where agentic code assistants understand your domain, patterns, and constraints to build applications collaboratively.
We'll build a complete AWS serverless application using flowgramming principles. You'll see how MCP (Model Context Protocol) and Project Intelligence patterns transform AI from a prompt-response tool into an intelligent development partner that maintains context, follows specifications, and adapts to real-world requirements.
This isn't theoretical - every line of code will be generated live through flowgramming collaboration. Watch as specifications drive architecture decisions, AI assistants suggest AWS best practices, and iterative refinement produces production-ready code.
Leave with a new development paradigm, working examples, and the tools to start flowgramming immediately. Perfect for developers ready to move beyond basic AI prompting to systematic AI-assisted development.

This is an evolution of my Maximise your Vibe Talk from AWS Summit Sydney taking a more practical approach to the topic