"The Open Guide to AWS is an open source writing project, which over the past year has become one of the most popular AWS resources on the web. It’s both a written resource on GitHub, with over 100 contributors, and a large Slack group. Each has become a forum for trading practical knowledge not covered in standard documentation. In this session, we talk about the Guide and how it started, share lessons on seeding initial content, the editorial process, and how to foster a healthy extended community and encourage social engagement. This session is part of the re:Invent Developer Community Day, six community-led sessions where AWS enthusiasts share technical insights on trending topics based on first-hand experiences and knowledge shared within local AWS communities."

1. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
T h e O p e n G u i d e t o A W S :
A G i t H u b - B a s e d R e s o u r c e f o r P r a c t i t i o n e r s
J o s h L e v y @ o j o s h e
T h a n o s B a s k o u s @ T h a n o s B a s k o u s
C o r e y Q u i n n @ Q u i n n y P i g
M a n i s h P a n d i t @ l o b s t e r 1 2 3 4
N o v e m b e r 2 7 , 2 0 1 7
D V C 2 0 2

2. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Four lightning talks
 Why You Should Stop Coding and Write — Josh
 The Open Guide to AWS — Thanos
 Contributing to og-aws — Manish
 Building Community Momentum — Corey
@QuinnyPig

3. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Talk to us!
Joshua Levy
@ojoshe
Cofounder, Open Guide to AWS
AWS Community Hero
Cofounder, Feynman Labs
Thanos Baskous
@ThanosBaskous
Cofounder, Open Guide to AWS
AWS Community Hero
Chief Architect, Blackstone
Corey Quinn
@QuinnyPig
Community Lead, Open Guide to AWS
Editor, Last Week in AWS
Manish Pandit
@lobster1234
Editor, Open Guide to AWS
Director of Engineering, Marqeta

4. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Why You Should Stop Coding and Write
Josh Levy
@ojoshe

5. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Why write?
• What’s your most costly mistake?
• It could be not sharing key
knowledge
• As engineers, we’re all on the same team
• Think about what we don’t write down
• “Coffee test”
@ojoshe

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• Share helpful know-how
• Not tutorials, or basic facts
• Thoughtful opinion ≫ facts we can Google
Limitations, cost and performance tips,
overlooked solutions,
alternatives,
and especially gotchas!
• “Experts don’t answer questions”
• Give people the framework to make their own decisions
What should we share? @ojoshe

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• Install “callbacks” in your head
• When you realize something might be useful to many
people yet few people know it…
• Write it down
• Repeat — first in a doc (Quip), then on GitHub
• Collaborate and get feedback along the way
• Separate copy-editing and organization from capturing
ideas
• Few people are experts and good at writing, and that’s OK!
• Have a conversation!
• Interactions between beginners and experts ≫ experts alone
But I don’t have time! @ojoshe

8. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
The Open Guide to AWS
Thanos Baskous
@ThanosBaskous

9. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
The Open Guide to AWS
• Practical, living guide
• 200K+ readers — most popular non-
Amazon AWS resource on the Web
• Large and active Slack community
• Dozens of AWS services, links,
patterns, best practices
• By and for devs, admins, ops, and
practitioners of all kinds
github.com/open-guides/og-aws
@ThanosBaskous

10. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Market Landscape Attribution to Authors Contributor Guide
Basics, Tips, and Gotchas Network Cost Diagram Service Matrix
The Open Guide to AWS
github.com/og-aws
@ThanosBaskous

11. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
The Open Guide to AWS @ThanosBaskous

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How we run og-aws: Goals
Maintain high quality of content
Maximize coverage
Create an inclusive and supportive community
Give credit!
@ThanosBaskous

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Contribution Guidelines Social Engagement Attribution
Chat Community Events and
Meetups
Code of Conduct
contributor-covenant.org
How we run og-aws: Methods @ThanosBaskous

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Contributing to og-aws
Manish Pandit
@lobster1234

15. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
My first encounter
• Ran into the guide while researching Amazon Simple
Queue Service (Amazon SQS)
• Intrigued by the quality, format, and amount of
content
• Truly open – able to do a few pull requests right
away
@lobster1234

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Bootstrapping new sections
• New service announcements happen often
• Quip templates followed by editor/expert reviews
• GitHub pull requests for community feedback
@lobster1234

17. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
@lobster1234

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Adding undocumented content
• For when you run into hidden gotchas
• Not in any official documentation
• Not covered in the guide
• Not reported on forums, GitHub, or
StackOverflow
• Solve, and share!
@lobster1234

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We ran into one..
• Amazon SNS-SQS fan-out would not work with SSE-enabled
SQS
• Reached out to Thanos on og-aws Slack for advice
• Wrote a blog post detailing the reproduction steps
• Linked a gotcha in the guide to the blog post
@lobster1234

20. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
@lobster1234

21. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Building Community Momentum
Corey Quinn
@quinnypig

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It all started late last year… @QuinnyPig

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My first commit @QuinnyPig

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My first commit: 1 line diff @QuinnyPig

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Try to make sure your tone fits @QuinnyPig

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Some PRs languish @QuinnyPig

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Lengthy wait times for PRs The Slack team was stagnant No bias toward “YES!”
The Battle of the Oxford Comma Languishing PRs > 1,000 external links to keep fresh
There were an assortment of challenges
@QuinnyPig

28. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
How to contribute
• If you see something broken, fix it
•Join our Slack team:
@QuinnyPig
https://og-aws-slack.lexikon.io/
https://github.com/open-guides/og-aws

29. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Aggregating re:Invent changes
Join our Slack team:
https://og-aws-slack.lexikon.io/
And hang out in #the-wheel
@QuinnyPig

30. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Questions?

31. © 2017, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Thank you!
Artem Nikitin (artemnikitin) — editor (Certificate Manager)
Ben Kehoe (benkehoe) — expert (IoT
Bogdan Luput (bgdnlp) — editor (EFS)
Dan Hermann (danhermann)— expert (RDS)
Donne Martin (donnemartin) — expert (tools)
Eric Hammond (ehammond) — expert (Lambda, serverless)
Max Grigorev (forwidur) — editor (EBS, RDS)
Jason Barry (JCBarry) — editor (CloudWatch)
Joshua Levy (jlevy) — project lead, editor (topics not otherwise assigned)
Kim Schmidt (kimschmidtsbrain) — expert (AWS Marketplace, Aurora)
Manish Pandit (lobster1234) — editor (Batch, SQS, SNS)
Luke de Oliveira (lukedeo) — expert (machine learning, Terraform, orchestration)
Lynn Langit (lynnlangit) — editor (IoT)
Max Zanko (max-zanko) — editor (EC2, S3, Glacier, EMR, Redshift)
John Merrells (merrells) — expert (cloud infrastructure, when to use AWS)
Nitin S (nitingithub) — editor (cost management)
Noah Zoschke (nzoschke) — editor (KMS)
Corey Quinn (QuinnyPig) — community lead, editor (news and updates, cost management)
Rich Adams (richadams) — editor (VPC)
Thanos Baskous (ThanosBaskous) — project lead, editor (topics not otherwise assigned)
Min (wumintendy) — expert (ECS, CloudWatch, SQS, RDS, WAF)
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Thank you!