Still a few days into 2025, it’s a brilliant time to retrospect the year and cherish on the good and amazing moments while also learning lessons from the moments that happened to teach you something.

2024 has been quite a journey, here are some of the highlights from my personal and professional life. In today’s age of AI tools which web-scrap and feed on data on Social Media and generate your year, I decided to do some self-reflection and share some highlights. Not only me, but there is a majority of folks who would like to see self-reflections rather than AI generated reflection.

Community, Advocacy and Evangelism

Being into tech community and also a Developer Relations professional, community, advocacy and evangelism becomes a major part of your life. It’s not only for professional growth but also helps in an overall growth of you as a person - you develop people skills, art of negotiating, and communication be it in vocal or written or unspoken forms tends to improve. Looking back at 2024, yes I’ve certainly grown in these areas in the last 365 days!

Conferences and meet-ups

I have a hobby of collecting lanyards from the conferences I attended whether as a attendee or representing Freshworks as a sponsor or a speaker. This year was certainly event-full with 23 conferences globally which I attended in person. While majority of them as a speaker, sharing some of my insights with Cloud, AWS, Serverless, APIs and Freshworks Developer Platform. Not only sharing but also learning from peers and even attendees when they catch up post session saying - ”Wow, you know what? I too came across the same roadblock but had a different approach or I discovered this helps” which makes me think, yea, there are multiple ways of solving this problem. This year was able to deliver over 25 sessions at conferences and meet-ups which not only was an enthusiasm I share but well received by the audience. Not just sharing my expertise, with 30 Days of Amplify by AWS UG India, did play a role of volunteering to make the virtual event a grand success with virtual sessions, workshop and an in-person workshop with AWS UG Bengaluru.

Cleve.AI did pick up one of the sessions that I presented at AWS Community Day Mumbai about Serverless APIs which also had a good response on LinkedIn.

AWS UG Bengaluru

This year, in addition to attending and speaking at conferences, AWS UG Bengaluru along with other UG leaders—Avinash, Ayyanar, and Bhuvaneswari—to organize and host our monthly AWS UG Bengaluru meet-ups for 11 months. We partnered with New Relic, Elastic, Nokia, JFrog, and HPE (in reverse chronological order) to bring in the right speakers for each month's theme. A major highlight was AWS Community Day Bengaluru, our first flagship event, which we co-organized as a team. From securing sponsorships to managing logistics, it was a great success and a testament to our plans to expand AWS Community Day Bengaluru in 2025. Stay tuned!

ServerlessDays Bengaluru

Another milestone event was ServerlessDays Bengaluru, with the Serverless-First mindset people - Jeevan, Prashanth, Srushith, Rahul, AntStack and KonfHub team. While this time the took on the hat to look into quality content and CFPs with running one of the tracks, it did give me a different yet an amazing experience as an organizer and volunteer for ServerlessDays Bengaluru 2024. I’m sure at this point everyone who attended / sponsored / spoke at ServerlessDays Bengaluru 2024 have been sharing their experience which is a true testament of how well it was done!

Content

2024 has been a year where I became self-critical and evaluated my content—blogs and newsletters—more through the lens of "Is this meeting good quality? Is this something I, as a reader, really find valuable?" This led to some of my blogs remaining unpublished because I felt they needed more work, pushing my limits. I call it content-level-up. Six blogs were well received about Serverless and architecting Serverless applications on AWS, with some latest updates and trade-offs on The Serverless Terminal blog.

The Serverless Terminal newsletter is something I've picked up as a regular cadence. All newsletter authors know this—it's hard to collate and bring up a great issue. Over 2024, the newsletter has seen a significant spike in total traffic across the months, with an average of over 2k reads and a 41% open rate. Guilty as charged, I missed one newsletter issue for Nov 30th, 2024. Also, in December, I did a cleanup of subscribers who weren't actively opening the newsletter, so if you've stopped receiving emails, subscribe and stay active!

The Zacs’ Show Talking AWS podcast, which Arshad Zackeriya and I host, allowed us to produce 8 podcasts about various topics, from engineering teams and management to technical topics with an IaC focus—Application Composer (now renamed to Infrastructure Composer). We brought in guests and had them share some brilliant insights!

Collaborations

In professional life, connections go a long way! When you think of collaborating, whether with the community spirit of learning together or exploring opportunities, it matters. Being an ambivert (yes, I am), I collaborate with a vision for work, community, personal growth, and exploring other interest areas.

I focused primarily on AWS and Serverless, but this year I took up the challenge to step out of my path to learn something new. Guess what! I started digging into Generative AI (I like the technology, but I’m against the narrative of GenAI marketing and the overhype technology leaders come up with). I honed new interests, driven by curiosity to learn about technology, but work demanded this upskilling. This was only possible through collaborations with fellow engineers and community members who are experts in the AI/ML space, allowing me to learn “GenAI for dummies.”

Vision for 2025

So much happened this year that it's hard to put into words. Some areas of focus and vision for 2025 require adjustments based on lessons learned both easily and the hard way. The achievements worth celebrating and the failures, along with the disheartening moments where I told myself, "dude, you got it all in!" to saying at the end of the road, "see, you made you great!".

One of the adrenaline rush moments in NYC was from the 106th floor high Edge of a NYC skyscraper, trying SkyClimbing along with Vivek. You can see at the bottom of the picture where folks are on the observation deck.

In 2024, I did some unexpected adventures with friends, family, and even solo. One thing I realized was, “Wow, I didn’t know it was such fun!” But certain things did take a backseat, and realizing the things I have to work on, 2025 is going to be about sharpening that sword and putting it into action!

In 2025, I look forward to growing my expertise, collaborating with folks not just with the intent to share my expertise but also with a selfish motive to learn something new. Of course, working with the Community has just enhanced my personal and professional life, so there is more to do in 2025!

One other thing I thought of doing during the holidays is to read more and more (not only in a nerdy way but also picking up some skills). Luckily, I’m ahead of schedule for 2025 because I did wrap up reading How to Think Bigger: Aim Higher, Get More Motivated, and Accomplish Big Things, which has helped me put a few things into my 2025 vision and aim for bigger and higher things to accomplish.

Wrap up!

At this point, you might think, "zachjonesnoel is living it," but you may not know I'm also on the same flight with too much turbulence—it's life! This blog reflects on my Community contributions and a few personal things that have helped me become a better person. More on the work side of reflection will be coming soon.

Originally, I planned this blog for Dec 31st, 2024, but thanks to my procrastination and the difficulty in finding the motivation to write a "non-technical blog," I finally brought the reflections of my 2024 into words. As the How to Think Bigger book says, the chimp in you always wants something rewarding and comforting, and there are ways to fool the chimp and take control of the mind.

Cheers to all for making my 2024 amazing, and I wish you all a Happy and Prosperous New Year 2025. Let's get into sport mode and achieve those goals, making a process of learning and growing together! Everyone has a story to tell, so if you're not making it public, promise yourself to look back at that reflection of 2024. It will help you learn a lot about yourself and help you shape yourself with a new mindset.