Workshop Context: Adventures in Data Systems
This one holds a special place. “Harvesting Data: Adventures in Data Systems” at the University of Santo Tomas was my first speakership outside of my own campus — and the AWS Student Builder Group UST gave me the warmest welcome I could have asked for. A room full of student developers, aspiring data engineers, and cloud builders showed up ready, and that energy made everything feel worth it.
Hands-On Architecture: Polyglot Cloud Data Layer
The day ran in two carefully paced sessions:
- Conceptual Keynote: The Data Mindset — How engineers reason about data storage tiers. We explored why Amazon S3 exists for unstructured blobs, what makes Amazon RDS the right call for relational consistency, and when Amazon DynamoDB’s single-table design outperforms traditional normalized SQL schemas. Less about memorizing service names, more about training the engineering instinct of when and why.
- Full-Day Hands-On Lab: Solving Sam’s Problem — Participants cloned a pre-built Hono.js and Vue.js web app, received an architecture guide, and were given a realistic production bottleneck: an app groaning under PDF documents and raw audit logs all crammed into a single PostgreSQL database instance.
Takeaways & Student Impact
While attendees worked through the guide, I moved around the room—answering questions table by table, unblocking networking issues, and watching the solution take shape one connection at a time. By the end of the workshop, builders had a working polyglot backend wired to three distinct AWS data services. Watching students go from first principles to a running architecture in a single afternoon is exactly why I keep showing up to these rooms.