Generative AI, Technical Content Creation, and more - AWS User Group Kenya

I created this newsletter to share about all my learnings related to generative AI on AWS. I however think this week's post is a worthwhile detour.

The AWS Community based in Nairobi, Kenya invited me to participate in a recent series of events that they had lined up during the course of last week.

The activities started with a participation at an Innovation Session hosted by the KCA University . With approximately 100 students in attendance, AWS Community Builders Adeline Makokha Kevin Tuei and I presented and discussed topics ranging from an introduction to AWS, generative AI, and the various AWS Community Programs. We had great engagement with the students, with a few students sharing about what they're building with generative AI. I must say I learned a lot here about seizing the moment, one of the students volunteered to demonstrate a generative AI application that he's built to address issues that law officers commonly encounter. This captured the attention of some of the professors in attendance so who knows where his courage may lead.

The three of us then joined my awesome colleagues Edward Kiarie and Murithi Gitonga for a very exciting recap of some of the announcements from AWS re:invent 2023 hosted by the AWS User Group Kenya . At almost 150 attendees this recap session was the biggest in-person event ever hosted by this community. Besides meeting so many amazing folks, my other highlights were Adeline's localized demonstration of Amazon Bedrock image generation capability using Amazon Titan Image Generator G1 v1 Model on the Image Playground.

Kevin's Developer Tools recap provided great storytelling and humor, along with providing attendees with an opportunity to tell their own stories related to application monitoring and observability. This style of presentation ensured that recaps on announcements that included launches such as the Amazon CloudWatch Application Signals captured the interest of the attendees because of the real-life use cases provided.

T.S.Khamala Chibire closed out the event by making an exciting announcement about the upcoming AWS Community Day Kenya which will be hosted on April 13, in-person at the Strathmore University . Stay close to Terence and the rest of the team to stay updated on more details.

Lastly, we held a focus session with members of the community who are already creating AWS technical content. In this focus session we discussed ways in which we can all work together to raise the bar even higher on this content.

Huge congratulations to the organizers and hosts who ensured that we all had a memorable few days Kirimi Gitonga Mark Orina Nelly Nyadzua .

I am super excited to see all that this community will continue to do this year and beyond, we already have so much to look forward to with the Community Day and all the technical content they will be continuing to create, just to name a few.

And, how do I end this post without mentioning that I now have a Kenyan name, Ellan Wambugu figured that the name "Wangui" suits me quite well. Ellan tells the meaning of the name quite well.

'Til next time AWS Community Kenya!