Graduating New Voices 2026
What the program is, what was my experience and why you should join it next year if you can.
Originally published at AWS Builder Center.
What it is?
AWS New Voices is a training program which helps you improve your public speaking and confidence by giving you various tools and mainly a structure of the talk.
It is offered by AWS to all Community Builders and Heroes. The first step is to join AWS Community Builders and then once you are part of the program joining the AWS New Voices will be one of many opportunities you get.
The program is structured as five weekly 90-minutes sessions with the speaking coach. The sessions are fully interactive and energizing. If you are thinking to join just to attend you should reconsider joining. There is approximately 200 people in each cohort but your camera is always on and microphone will be on not occasionally but regularly. If you are afraid of speaking to other people that's good - this program is here exactly to help you but you will need to put your energy into it in order to overcome your fears.
My experience with the program
I had a pleasure to be lead by Meridith Grundei and her husband Gary.
I saw this lovely couple every Wednesday for last 5 weeks. I couldn't imagine how 200 people on Zoom call could be interactive until I was randomly assigned to my first breakout room with Łukasz. Suddenly it clicked - it's not about 200 people watching presentation, it's about meeting random people from all over the world and talking to them about given topic making various improv exercises etc. I felt very exposed from start but after first conversation I felt also energized - from then on I have focused on the energizing part.
The first session took place a day before AWS Community Day CEE where I was invited as a backup speaker. Coincidentally while connected to our first breakout room we found out with Łukasz that I was traveling to Budapest and he was already there so we had a chance to catch up in person next day as well.
What I didn't know was that Meridith was invited to give the closing keynote. I can tell you that her energy is not an act. I was very happy to have an opportunity to speak to her in person over the bowl of goulash in Budapest Garden. It was great to speak to Anahit, Júlia and Monica as well - meeting your heroes in person helps you to realize that they are regular people - same as you - and that your goals are achievable.
The first session was most important to me because I realized what the program is going to be and about its format.
The second session I've attended right after giving my talk at nobullshit.camp. Here I already applied what I've learned in the first session. Before joining New Voices I wanted to be unique and I had frown upon seeing people who's presentations looked alike in a structure. Everyone had introduction slide at the beginning and I wanted to be different and have put mine always at the end. I realized why the structure is important and so I adapted.
The rest of the sessions were focused on the structure of the talk and how to engage with the audience. We've learned how to introduce ourselves properly, how to understand our audience and how to let the audience get something out of our talk without leaving confused.
We've learned by doing and all the first 4 sessions we've been preparing for our lightning talk where we would apply all the learnings.
The lightning talk
As part of the program you are going to try put all you've learned in first 4 weeks together. The lightning talk is 3 minute presentation about virtually anything - the most important is to follow the structure.
When I was working on my talk I went through the exercise sheets which were hand out and fill them all. This part helped to shape the whole talk and I really recommend you not to skip it.
I am not going to share the materials - even if I could it wouldn't help you without the explanation and full 5 weeks of experience - but I am going to share my lightning talk so you can imagine how it might look like.
I decided to talk about the Serverless as this main topic for all of my current talks and I am confident in this area. I wanted to focus on the structure not on the topic.
[hook - story telling]
I remember my first experience with ElasticSearch like it was today. I was assigned a task where I was supposed to create complex filtering of users in clients' admin-facing system.
Since I have never before worked with ElasticSearch I've read the documentation and implemented the feature best to my knowledge and experience. Everything worked on my machine but once deployed to production the query didn't take a fraction of a second. It took down the whole server.
This happened because I was not aware of how the things work under the hood and I only implemented some abstraction without understanding it. Same thing usually happen when people start using Serverless for the first time.
[credibility line]
My name is Ivan and I've been using Serverless technology since 2018.
[what the audience will gain]
Once you consider using Serverless you will have one more tool in your tool belt ready to use for when the opportunity comes.
[why this topic matters now]
Especially today when everyone can spin up an LLM agent and build their thing I think it is most important to differentiate yourself. By understanding various architectures and approaches to software development you will gain the competitive advantage.
[key takeaway 1]
When using Serverless you just need to realize single thing - there is no running process. You get the request, then you process it, you return a response and your environment dies. That's why you need to build idempotent and stateless functions.
[key takeaway 2]
The Serverless is simple - you have your code, you deploy it and you run it. No servers or clusters to manage. But remember there is no simplicity without tradeoffs. Whenever you see some abstraction look for tradeoffs. In Serverless they look like cold starts, timeouts and different mental model for developing your application.
[key takeaway 3]
The Serverless is not a silver bullet. Actually there are no silver bullets. When your traffic is inconsistent and mostly event driven then serverless might be great match for you. If on the other hand your traffic is steady and predicable using serverless might be counter productive. Threat it as any other tool - play around with it, understand what is it good for but when you come across screws choose screwdriver instead of the hammer.
[conclusion]
I might have taken down a server or two but the important thing is that I've learned something which no documentation teaches you - you need to try things to learn things. You need to break things to learn things. And also that you should have a test environment which you test your code with before you promote it to production.
With the Serverless all of this is easy - deploying new environments quickly is what the Serverless is built for.
No matter what technology you use, go build something!
Unfortunately I couldn't attend the last session so I only ever read my talk to my wife. It fits to 3 minutes limit exactly. I couldn't believe how much information I could fit in. I believe that delivering is different than reading and that I would need to polish this talk even further.
I couldn't get the feedback from Meridith nor my cohort buddies but even just the act of working on this quick talk has given me something which is valuable. I got to think about my next speech in the terms of the structure and from perspective of my audience.
My next talk will be prepared for the audience and I hope I will be able to engage with them so it is not just about me delivering the talk and go home but also about the audience enjoying it.
Great thing is that I already have my hook which I can reuse in my next presentation.
Conclusion
If you are interested in technology and/or AWS and you like to write about it or speak about it on stage you should join AWS Community Builders program.
Once you are in and you want to hone your speaker skills I definitely recommend joining the AWS New Voices - it's free sessions with speaking coach that's a no-brainer for me.
If you don't have the luck to meet Meridith within this program then I strongly recommend to subscribe for her free newsletter on her website which also comes with various techniques and give you information about how to improve your public speaking.
Graduating is not the same as being certified. After 5 sessions I still need to write about my experience (this article) and deliver next talk (TechMeetup conference) where I will try to apply at least a few of the things I've learned.
I will post my experience afterwards here so keep tuned.