Talks & Community

Building Your Personal Brand: A Student's Guide to Online Presence

What does your online presence say about you? For many students, searching their name online brings up little more than a LinkedIn profile and perhaps some social media accounts. This limited visibility can make it challenging to stand out professionally or showcase your actual skills and projects. A personal website offers a solution - providing a dedicated space where you can control your professional narrative and present your work on your own terms. ...

February 15, 2026 · 20 min
AWS & Cloud

Pokémon Surveys, Serverless Architecture, and Teaching Students to Build on AWS

Back in November, I was preparing for the Cracking the Cloud presentation at UNC Charlotte. I needed a way to explain how the cloud fundamentally changed what’s possible on the internet—not through abstract concepts, but through something students could immediately relate to. That’s when I remembered Thomas Game Docs. If you’ve never heard of her: she’s a YouTuber who makes incredibly well-produced video essays about video games. And she sometimes runs surveys asking her audience things like “Who’s the LEAST popular Pokémon?” or “Who’s the LEAST popular Animal Crossing villager?” ...

December 27, 2025 · 12 min