Video Interview
I did a video interview about my techical role as AWS Evangelist at kreuzwerker. You find the full video here
Here is the summary of the interview:
This episode of the "Tech Roles Uncovered" livestream series features Manuel Vogel-Johnson, an AWS Evangelist at an AWS-focused cloud consultancy operating across Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, explaining what the role actually involves. After a quick round of icebreakers (he prefers containers over serverless, found the AWS networking certification the hardest, having failed it once, and prefers Riesling over Frankfurt apple wine), he traces his path: computer science studies, building his own PCs as a teenager, six months backpacking after burning out at a 60-hour-a-week startup job, a master's degree where he discovered he loved teaching, then devops and consulting roles before moving into the evangelist position.
The evangelist role splits into a few pillars: internal training and enablement, including a weekly open office hour where colleagues bring any AWS question, hands-on coding and code review to keep his technical skills current, staying up to date on AWS's fast-moving service catalog, and public speaking at client events, meetups, and conferences. He also still spends part of his time as a hands-on consultant on client projects, and he is the only person holding this title at his company.
I don't have to know everything but I know where to look sums up how he handles the breadth of AWS's service catalog. He leans on adapting to different audiences, from engineers who want hard facts to executives who want a higher-level, confidence-building pitch.
The golden jacket he's wearing is AWS's reward for completing all 12 available certifications, which he finished
the year before this recording, three in 2020 and 2021, then seven in a single year, several studied for on train rides
between cities. (See also the blog post which goes into more detail) Networking was by far the hardest exam for him since he came from a developer rather than infrastructure
background; the DevOps Professional exam felt straightforward given his years of hands-on experience in that area.
Much of the conversation covers how he makes technical training engaging rather than dry. His approach starts before
the session begins: arriving early to chat with participants, learning names, and sending out a short questionnaire
beforehand to gauge the audience's level. During sessions he keeps slides light on text, builds in hands-on exercises
with pre-configured AWS accounts and copyable code snippets, and leans on storytelling techniques picked up from formal
speaker coaching and, unexpectedly, from years spent as a salsa dance teacher, where keeping the room's energy up while
still teaching real content was a core skill. When something breaks mid-demo, he treats it as material to improvise
with rather than something to hide.
Asked what shaped his career most, he points to two things: a persistent curiosity that kept him learning new tools and languages, sometimes late into the night, and a mentor from his freelance years who pushed him to confront his fears about public exposure. If you don't face your fears then you cannot grow was the mentor's core message, and he credits that push with helping him get comfortable being watched, judged, and occasionally challenged in front of an audience. His advice to anyone considering the evangelist path: be honest with yourself about whether you're comfortable with visibility and personal exposure, since the job means constantly putting your knowledge and personality on display and accepting that not everyone will like it. He describes still feeling nervous before talks even now, and treats that as normal rather than something to eliminate. His most-used emoji, for the record, is the rocket.
