2024 in review

Looking back on 2024!

Work 👩🏻‍💻

It's been another very full year! Midyear this year I got the chance to take on something new leading the go-to-market team for serverless and AWS-native containers. It's been six years since I had the good fortune to stumble into serverless in my first role at AWS. Serverless technology and community has had such an impact in my career, and so it's been exciting to take on a leadership role and have an impact on the great things that are coming up next. Looking forward to 2025!

I'm still enjoying the change into management roles, which continues to stretch me and teach me new things constantly. Of all my many learnings this year, one of the biggest is to spend more time asking questions. I've observed that this is something the best leaders I work with do. For example, when someone challenges an idea I've proposed, often my default reaction would be to explain to them why they're wrong. But if you instead ask them a question to better understand where they're coming from, I've found that you both get a lot further. Firstly, because you're engaging with the other person's idea rather than immediately dismissing it, which helps people feel heard and their perspectives valued. Secondly, you've now brought the other person into the process of problem-solving with you, which is much more empowering and trust-building. Asking more and better questions is one skill I'll be working on emulating into next year.

Speaking 🎤

I had a few speaking opportunities in 2024, including speaking at ServerlessDays Cardiff and AWS Summit London with Tom Collins, Principal Software Engineer at the UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, on continuously evolving serverless architectures.

I also spoke at AWS Summit Berlin with Maximilian Schellhorn.

This year at re:Invent was the first year in a long while that I haven't done a version of my "getting started with serverless" session. I love that talk, but I figure you can only be "getting started" for so long! It was time to pass the torch, and I enjoyed broadening to interesting new topics.

This year, I co-presented two sessions on the theme of choosing the right tool for the right job. In the first, Maximilian Schellhorn and I delivered his fantastic talk that walks through the fundamental differences between containers or serverless functions, how to evaluate which is the right choice for your workload, and real world examples of AWS customers and how they chose one of the two (or both!)

My second re:Invent session was with Christina Andonov and Giedrius Praspaliauskas on how we're seeing platform teams give developers the best of both worlds by deploying serverless services through Kubernetes APIs with tools like AWS Controllers for Kubernetes (ACK) and Kubernetes Resource Operators (kro).

Learning 💡

This year, I spent plenty of time learning managerial skills and exploring technology topics, but I found less time to spend on hands-on technical learning projects. I'm still looking for a good way to work that into my regular routine as a manager - if anyone has tips on how they've done that well, I'm interested!

I did pick up a new skill in my creative projects - I learned to crochet to make a blanket for my cousin's daughter that was born this year. I had a lot of fun with it (and also found that crochet is so much more forgiving and easy to fix mistakes than knitting!)

Books 📚

I read 24 books this year (up from 20 in 2023). I came across a lot of gems this year in particular!

The Goldfinch - The only way to describe this book is that you inhabit the story rather than read it. It took me three months to read and I was sad to finish it. The descriptive language makes you look at the world differently after reading it.
Project Hail Mary - At least five people recommended this book to me, and it lived up to the praise!
Killers of the Flower Moon - It's incredible when non-fiction can be so gripping and disturbing.
Snow Crash - I really enjoyed the writing style. It was so interesting to read the 1992 depiction of what virtual reality would be like and to think about what we can easily do today versus what is still impossible.
To Say Nothing of the Dog - This book was so chaotic and so much fun. I thought this would be more sci-fi, but it ended up being lightly sci-fi and mostly romping around Victorian Oxford.
Bunny - Still not sure the hell I just read, but I enjoyed every moment. Such a satisfying and surprising ending.
A New Way To Think - On the work book side, I learned a lot from this one, particularly on how to use data and the difference between strategy and planning.
Rebecca - I read this back in 2022 and it's one of my all-time favorites, but I'm including it in the list this year because I got the most beautiful copy from 1941 for my birthday (thanks Danielle!)