This year has been quite challenging personally with everything happening in my country. However, I've been blessed with an a supportive family who helped me keep focus and as always, writing code and articles has been a helpful distraction from the ongoing craziness.
This year, I had three main goals:
Focus more on live events and conferences and become a better live speaker, especially in English, which is not my mother's tongue.
Mentor and help people write their first blog posts and get them noticed by publishing their work on my website.
Do more open-source work.
I'm quite happy to say that this year has been very successful. I'm very satisfied with the results, and I hope next year will be even better!
Blog Posts & AWS.com Articles
I've published 66 blog posts on my website since its start - 25 posts were published just this year, and 5 were guest writers' posts! It's a privilege to help someone shape an idea into a well-written article. Thank you Koby, Noa, Marcos and Nathan!
The blog post I enjoyed the most writing was 100% "Reflecting on Serverless: Current State, Community Thoughts, and Future Prospects."
The first post of 2025 belongs to new guest writer, so we're starting 2025 with a bang!
If you want to my help with writing your own blog post and publishing it here, check out the come write me with section for more details.
AWS.com Articles
I've had the honor of publishing three articles on AWS.com with some of the most talented AWS employees I know: Bill Tarr, Shani Kazaz, and Anton Aleksandrov. Our articles span governance with Service Catalog and serverless blueprints 1 and 2.
I also participated in writing the case study AWS published about CyberArk which tells the story how we reduced the time to production for every new SaaS service by 18 weeks.
Conferences
My focus this year was on doing more live sessions and becoming a better speaker. While life, war, and small kids threw curve balls all year long, I was able to attend some pretty awesome events. I got to speak at DevOpsDay TLV, AWS Summit TLV, and AWS Community Day TLV. However, two other events rose above the others.
The first was AWS DACH Community Day—an event filled with friends and beer (Johannes, Raphael, Markus, Phillip, Linda, Thorsten, Monica, Luciano, Yan, and many more!) in the beautiful city of Munich. I got to speak in front of over 200 people alone on stage in English—no help or co-speakers—just me.
The second highlight was speaking at AWS re: Invent again this year, but this time in the Serverless track in a breakout session with the legendary Julian Wood in Vegas in front of 400 people! Vegas as a whole was quite the highlight - meeting with friends and the community for a week long of sessions, food and parties.
I also participated in a couple of webinars—Serverless office hours and Platform Con 24—and had the pleasure of giving a talk at the "believe in serverless" community.
Podcasts
I had a good time speaking at the Logicata podcast with Karl and Jon (whom I trekked with at AWS re:invent!) and the AWS Developers podcast with Sebastian.
Social Media
You can now find me also on Bluesky: @ranthebuilder.cloud
GitHub Highlights
I've created several new open-source project about Fargate, some AI and Serverless blueprints, IAM automation and more. Check them out here.
Two projects are my favorites:
aws-lambda-env-modeler: Is now being downloaded over 35,000 times per month!
AWS-Lambda-Env-Modeler is a Python library designed to simplify managing and validating environment variables in your AWS Lambda functions with Pydantic.
Read more about it here.
aws-lambda-handler-cookbook: It's incredible to see this project receiving over 560 stars on GitHub, a testament to the community's support and appreciation. This repository provides a working, deployable, open-source, serverless service template with an AWS Lambda function and AWS CDK Python code with all the best practices and a complete CI/CD pipeline.
2025
In 2025, I want to venture into hardcore topics like cross-region disaster recovery, learn new AWS services that I'm unfamiliar with, speak more globally, meet new people, and try to do more open-source work!
I've already booked three events for 2025, so that's a good start!
And lastly, I'm hoping for a peaceful year in my country and the entire region.
Come Write with Me!
I'm opening the doors to my blog (yet again!) for first time writers and aspiring tech enthusiasts who want to share their insights, learn how to shape an idea into a blog post and gain exposure on my website. Knowledge sharing and collaboration are essential for the growth of our tech community and I can help!
What Can I Offer You
I will mentor you and help you write the best article you can. I will not write it for you but provide feedback, reviews, and guidance.
A blog template and help to get you started.
Exposure and social sharing through my website and my LinkedIn/Twitter: Your post will be shared with over 1000 mail subscribers. My posts are viewed over 150000 times a year.
Publish an article you own as a co-writer on my ranthebuilder.cloud.
I'm the editor - I will publish only content that fits the standards and theme of my website.
The Process
You will submit a blog idea according to the form in the 'How to Submit an Idea' section below. I will let you know via email if I can help you and/or if I find your blog post idea fits my website. Please kindly remember that in a case of rejection it's not personal.
Once accepted, we will define a flexible publishing date so we have something to look forward to and start working.
Some general notes:
Take it easy - We will schedule a few meetings along the way. However, don't expect daily 30-minute meetings or daily emails - We are both doing this to learn and have fun; this is not a job; you are not working for me and vice versa.
Format - The blog format will match my other blog posts (look & feel), but the voice and content are yours. I will, however, review it and offer feedback and suggestions.
Publishing - I will publish blog posts up to ranthebuilder.cloud's standard. You are the owner of the content. You may publish your post on other platforms too.
My Expectations of You
Mutual respect & professionalism.
Put in the effort and time - I will give my time for you and expect the same level of seriousness from you. Writing good content takes time - a blog post takes me anywhere from 3 to even 20 hours.
Be open to feedback and criticism - it's part of the learning process, nobody writes a perfect blog post on the first try.
Write about something you are enthusiastic about and want to tell the world about.
Read a draft before you send it to review. Use Grammarly or other text-proofing tools.
Don't submit an already published subject (by you or others, research first!). If it has already been done before, think about that new perspective you bring to the table.
What am I looking For
Subjects that I think will be interesting:
Serverless takeaways, use cases, problems you solved with serverless
Review a new serverless feature (deep dive) and best practices suggestions.
Technical AWS posts with Python code (Type script might be ok, too)
Technical AWS posts with CDK examples/Terraform/SAM.
Platform engineering stories & tips
Any interesting AI
Containers (even K8S yes)
Any tech idea you think are passionate about
How to Submit an Idea
Use the following template and send an email to ran.isenberg@ranthebuilder.cloud :
Name: []
Introduce yourself in a few sentences: []
How did you hear about me? []
Timezone: [GMT]
Blog post idea: [be as detailed as possible. What do you want to write about? Why? what's the story you want to tell?]
Do you have a 'hands-on' experience with the blog post idea? [Yes/No]
I will get back to you as soon as I can!