'Stay consistent and persistent in your actions, and the rest will follow'

Jeevan Dongre has always been a catalyst, taking his passion for technology and sharing it with others, converting it into larger than life forms. He is one of the original champions and founding members of the AWS User Group in Bangalore, which started with four members and now boasts of over 8700 members. He is now the co-founder of a startup, AntStack - Serverless Limitless, along with his friend Prashant, incidentally whom he met through the AWS User Group.

“I strongly believe in peer-to-peer learning and am passionate about community building. I believe learning from others makes you more knowledgeable, and could be the fastest way of learning things. I was curious to know more about AWS and that’s when I became familiar with the concept of user groups and meetups. The idea of starting an AWS focused user group came up, and I was lucky enough to meet like-minded people at the right time, who, together started AWS UG, Bangalore in Jan 2011.”

In 2017, the AWS User Group conducted the first Community Day where about 250 people attended. This motivated them to continue the momentum and the following year’s Community Day grew with 450 attendees, 8 sponsors, 3 tracks and over 15 speakers. 2019 saw the largest Community Day in India ever with over 1000 attendees, 4 tracks, 32 speakers and 16 sponsors. With the pandemic, there were new learnings around conducting a digital event, but the first online community day saw an amazing 25,000 registrations. In this journey, Jeevan has also helped other cities like Pune, Mumbai and Chennai create active AWS User Groups and host community days. Acknowledging his contribution to Indian developer community, the AWS team recognized Jeevan an AWS Community Hero in 2016.

Looking back to his journey, Jeevan says his involvement with building the AWS Community Building opened up a whole new perspective of the world. “I met some of the smartest people through the AWS User Group. Running a User Group has contributed a lot to what I’m today. From organizing an event with 1000+ people to running errands when something breaks, building AWS community has made me agile and resilient.”, he says. “While interacting with various Amazon teams over the past 10 years, their leadership principles have inspired me to start a new journey from being an employee to an employer. It has encouraged me to take more risks and be more entrepreneurial.”

Jeevan always believed that fortune favours the brave. His advice to fellow developers is to keep going. “Things do not always go as per your plan and you’ll always have challenges in your path. Stay consistent and persistent in your actions, and the rest will follow.”