First time on AWS Community Day

Suddenly

Stepping onto the stage as a first-time speaker at AWS Community Day was an incredible experience, but the journey there was wild. It all started when Danh Hoang Hieu Nghi suddenly invited me to speak at the event.

To be honest, I was really stressed out. I had a huge workload at my company, including 4-5 pull requests (PRs) that I had to double-check and resolve conflicts for, plus I had to prepare for this presentation.

Implement

The system architecture fundamentals I learned in college really saved me. My co-speaker, Minh Thọ, is still a freshman, so moving the whole project from Railway to native AWS was a massive challenge for him. After understanding his struggles, I stepped in to handle the heavy lifting.

For that reason, I decided to refactor our entire URL shortener project to use native AWS. This led to some major headaches. I spent over two hours just trying to configure the domain in Amazon Route 53 because the nameservers (NS) generated by my Terraform apply didn’t match what was in the AWS Console somehow?

Then, right at the last minute, the frontend wasn’t displaying the actual link—it only showed the shortened ID.

const qrCode = computed(() => useQRCode(url));
const { copy } = useClipboard();
const { $toast } = useNuxtApp();

function copyUrl() {
	copy(url); // But this part working with full aws.fugiat.store/{id}
	$toast.success("Copied");
}

For the display and anchor link, it only open the id in new URL tab.

<NuxtLink
	:to="url"
	class="text-fg text-lg font-mono font-bold underline-link"
	target="_blank"
	>{{ url }}<i class="i-tabler-external-link align-top"></i
></NuxtLink> 

I ended up having to hardcode the base domain just to get things done.

const shortLink = computed(() => `https://aws.fugiat.store/${url.split("/").pop()}`);

const qrCode = computed(() => useQRCode(shortLink.value));
const { copy } = useClipboard();
const { $toast } = useNuxtApp();

function copyUrl() {
	copy(shortLink.value);
	$toast.success("Copied");
}
// ======================================================
<NuxtLink
	:to="shortLink"
	class="text-fg text-lg font-mono font-bold underline-link"
	target="_blank"
	>{{ shortLink }}<i class="i-tabler-external-link align-top"></i
></NuxtLink>

You as me why it happened? I don’t know, but follow YAGNI this pretty decent so we don’t really have to care much about this. Battling those bugs took me two completely sleepless nights to get everything done for the rehearsal.

Result

But hard work pays off—everything went smoothly! Presenting alongside Minh Thọ was incredibly rewarding. We shared the very first steps of our First Cloud AI Journey (FCAJ) and how to tackle the challenges of building a scalable project.

Being in the audience was just as valuable as speaking. I learned so much from the other sessions:

• Danh Hoang Hieu Nghi sharing very personal journey, but also a familiar path for many young builders who are trying to turn curiosity into real career opportunities.
• Nguyen Minh Tho admire his hard-working and humbleness
• Dat Pham gave an insightful breakdown of Data Analytics and solving real business problems.
• Cường Nguyễn shared a deep dive into CV prep and made me realize how critical “company culture” is when aiming for multinational companies.
• Trong Truong gave a great, hilarous and practical look into what DevOps Engineers actually do day-to-day.

I want to give my utmost respect and thanks to all the speakers for sharing their knowledge, and to the organizers for providing this platform. Thank you for welcoming a newcomer like me.

This is just the beginning of our FCAJ, and I am so excited to keep building, learning, and sharing with this amazing community!