Hosting an AWS Serverless Hero!

I guess it ‘s not that common meeting an AWS Serverless Hero! It is definitely not that common for such a thing to happen in Athens! Well, no matter how unbelievable may that sounds… this is what happened just yesterday evening!

Almost 10 days ago, I received a message from Aleksandar on Twitter (similarly to the way I got in touch with Slobodan a year ago :P) saying he was visiting Athens. At that moment, I was sitting at my computer, back in Orfium office, working on a rather not that exciting invoicing report. Thrilled from the news Aleksandar had delivered and the chance to have a coffee and meet him in person, I instantly thought; This is something that many would kill to be part of! Why not host an event where the tribe of devs would be able to interact, discuss and share their concerns?

And so that happened!

The Event

The event took place in the Foundation, at Athens city-centre. No matter the heavy rain (a kind of unusual weather condition for Greece), more than 40 people attended the presentation. Alex went through a tone of interesting different topics, some of which you can discover on his presentation slides featuring below.

Alex’s Slides

Aleksandar is an experienced senior software consultant and engineer, author of the book [Serverless Applications with Node.js] and an [AWS Serverless Hero](https://aws.amazon.com/developer/community/heroes/aleksandar-simovic/…). He has worked in a variety of industries ranging from insurance companies, property management companies to innovative biotech startups.

His passion is serverless architectures, business impacts of serverless, conversational programming, software craftsmanship and business strategy.
One of the authors of Claudia.js and Claudia Bot Builder, Scotty.js, contributor to AWS SAM, AWS Lambda Builders and many other open source libraries.
Has published almost 30 free and open source serverless components on the AWS Serverless Application Repository.

According to Kostas (Senior Data Engineer in Orfium).

“If I had to highlight just one part from Alex’s talk, then this would definitely be the real cases he brought, elaborating on how common problems can be solved with the use of Serverless. On the one hand, there are so many cases where you can actually use Serverless. On the other hand, there are so many services in AWS, able to provide you with the right solution at the right time. A good suggestion to explore all relevant applications would be to start looking at AWS use cases and tutorials. After all, Serverless is the future and we should be prepared!


Every year, Amazon announces a handful of new services and a hundred more features. For a quick overview, just check this year’s Lambda Layers and Sagemaker optimization, which in my opinion were pretty amazing.”

Next Steps

For us, the ORFIUM tech team, organising such an event was an amazing experience! That’s why meetups about similar topics and updates will be scheduled in the future. Their main goal? Bring together an audience that shares the same technological concerns, seeks for interact with tech-enthusiasts and professionals while able to discuss on different case studies and ideas.

Based on our culture to promote the dialogue within developers’ community we look forward to sponsoring and hosting more such events in Athens!



Michael Petychakis

Chief Technology Officer @ ORFIUM

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpetychakis/

https://github.com/mpetyx