AWS re:Invent is so intense and magical that it’s almost impossible to describe with just words. It’s a wild week packed with activities for every taste: games, workshops, meetups, breakouts, and countless opportunities for learning, networking, collaboration, and, why not, friendships for life, like the ones I have found.
Thanks to the AWS All Builders Welcome Grant program (check it out here or message me for more info), which covered all my hotel, event tickets, and flight expenses last year, I was able to live a dream far beyond my budget. I could taste many incredible experiences there and returned home with an EMEA award for my contributions to Women in Tech and DEI, plus a head full of ideas, inspiration, new projects, and collaborations that extended my Community Builder work across APAC, LATAM, and the Americas, benefiting many more women and tech beginners.
So many great things came from this: founding the AWS Women’s User Group Sweden, organising AWS Community Day Baltic, running Women in Tech workshops, giving talks in many AWS Community Days, launching my blog suzanamelo.com, and so on. The achievements that grew from that opportunity were countless, and I’ll be forever grateful.
This year, I returned to Las Vegas, this time as an alumni advisor for the ABW Grant. I had the rewarding mission of guiding a new cohort of grantees and helping them make the most of their re:Invent.
Again, it was an incredible experience: so much learning, reconnecting with dear friends I usually only see online, meeting new ones, and recharging with fresh ideas, projects, and collaborations.
But there was also a bittersweet feeling. Being immersed again in this magical cloud world, full of opportunities, made me wish the moment could last longer, but you can only be a grantee and an advisor once. I’m not sure if I’ll be back next year, and I wanted to carry this charging energy with me forever. So this time, I brought home another unique record of this life-changing experience: a tattoo I got during AWS re:Invent, a cloud.
☁️ Why a Cloud?#
As I’ve said in many articles, migrating into software development after my 40s, with no prior tech background, wasn’t easy, and it’s still challenging. This is one of the reasons I’ve always supported others as I grow.
But everything changed when, as a junior developer, I was asked to write my first AWS Lambda function and discovered the Cloud. My world shifted.
I realized that women and immigrants like me, people transitioning careers later in life, had far more opportunities than just software development. The Cloud opened a whole new universe of possibilities. Supporting tech beginners in exploring that universe became one of my flags.
But the meaning of my cloud tattoo goes beyond.
To reach the sky, and eventually the Cloud, humankind first had to believe it was possible. Visionaries like the Wright brothers and Alberto Santos-Dumont stepped outside their comfort zones to achieve what everyone thought was impossible. But it wasn’t. They changed their mindset first, and then they changed the world.
Our personal growth works the same way. Doing something new is scary, but not impossible. It requires effort. It’s not just walking anymore. You need new skills, the courage to step outside your comfort zone, and the willingness to learn how to fly.
💡 How to fly in the technology field?#
📚 Build your knowledge#
🔍 Stay curious - Keep learning, keep asking, explore new ideas and solutions, go beyond what’s in front of you. Curiosity sharpens your knowledge and expands your experience.
🤝 Find a mentor - A mentor who guides you, answers questions (or better yet, teaches you where to find the answers), reviews your work, and suggests improvements is life-changing. Having more than one mentor helps you learn from different perspectives. I’m deeply grateful for mine. I wouldn’t be here without their wisdom.
⏱️ Self-organization - Time management and self-organization are the foundation of any successful journey. Can you only study or work on your side project for 30 minutes a day? Or three times per week? That’s okay. Do what you can, but do it intentionally. Lock the time in your calendar and timebox it.Consistency is key: getting just 1% better every day results in a 365% improvement in one year.If you struggle to focus, the Pomodoro method is incredibly helpful. It saved me many times and taught me that most distractions can, in fact, wait for break time.
🔄 The CL/CD Loop: Continuous Learning → Continuous Doing#
🛠️ Practice - You build knowledge by learning, but you keep it through practice. If you study something and never touch it again, chances are you’ll forget almost everything. It happened to me many times. The more you use your knowledge, the sharper it becomes.
💻 Show your work - Learning and practicing are essential, but you also need to show the world your skills, what problems you can solve, and what you’re capable of. Talk at meetups, write posts or articles, publish your projects, or contribute to others. Choose the format that feels most comfortable for you, just don’t hide your skills.
🌐 Network - You may have amazing work to share, but who’s going to see it? Connections matter. Attend meetups, conferences, workshops, hackathons… any tech event! That’s where you find mentors, collaborators, potential team members, or even future employers. Events also give you new spaces and ways to share the things you’re building.
🚀 Going Beyond#
📣 Share your knowledge - I can’t think of a better way to learn than by teaching. When you explain something, you reflect on the content, refine your understanding, and absorb it even more deeply. Plus, you support someone else’s growth, which is incredibly fulfilling. You can support others’ growth through mentoring, meetups, volunteering, or helping a community.
👥 Find a community - But Suzana, isn’t this the same as networking? Yes and no. Networking is a crucial part of your Continuous Learning, Continuous Doing loop, but the CL/CD process can be tiring and sometimes frustrating. Community, however, recharges you. Communities give you peers who share your struggles, celebrate your wins, and help you overcome challenges. They exist in schools, meetups, tech groups - anywhere people grow together. As humans, these connections matter deeply, especially during tough times.
💛 Be kind to yourself - This is essential. Never, ever compare your journey to someone else’s. Compare yourself to yesterday’s version of you. Everyone learns at a different pace and shines in different skills. Own your learning process and don’t forget to celebrate your small victories along the way.
🎁 Wrapping Up#
Some of the items above appear in other articles because, in my opinion, they are simply essential for tech beginners, and I’ll repeat them as many times as needed. Many of them are also timeless and helpful at any stage of your career.
A personal confession: many of the tips in this article are also promises to myself, intentional commitments I want to reinforce as a professional who is constantly learning and growing. And as always, I share what I learn so we can grow together.
Some of these steps may feel easy, while others are uncomfortable. But as we already know, growth doesn’t happen in a comfort zone. To achieve great things, we need to go further. Not only walking. We need to fly.
That’s why I now carry a reminder on my arm:“Stop walking, Suzana. Fly to the Cloud and beyond.” 💭
And I know the journey will be lighter if we fly together.Are you joining me? ✨
This article was also published on my LinkedIn
