About

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Kevin Old

Sr. Product Manager Technical
AWS Amplify
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I build for the web.

I began building for the web in 1994 building little websites on Geocities and then building websites for clients, then hosting them.

I love love working in web technology. I started with Perl and PHP (back when PHP was named "Personal Home Page" interpreter) and was drawn to JavaScript shortly after it was released.

I've always been the "JavaScript" guy at my employers and administered Linux servers to learn the ins and outs of managing a web hosting provider as a side business.

Fast forward through the years and I've worked professionally with many companies and startups using Perl, PHP, Ruby but always coming back to JavaScript and Node.js. Managing servers with Bash scripts, gave way to Ansible scripts and then to the Serverless era when AWS Lambda was released.

After suffering through the days of MooTools, jQuery, Backbone and Angular, React finally solved the need better than any solution and it's his tool of choice using Next.js

I've dabbled in React Native, but found building mobile apps different from what I experienced building for the web. I was a panelist on a few episodes of React Native Radio in the early days of React Native, but found the struggles with RN projects to suck the joy out of building them, so my attention turned back to the web.

Testing has become a huge part of any project I work on using Jest or Mocha for unit tests and Cypress for end-to-end testing.

Functional programming style suits me best and I've found that the work I produce is most accurate since I can test every piece of the pipelines. I'm grateful to Professor Frisby's Most Adequate Guide to Functional Programming for helping the concepts stick in a familiar language.

I've standardized on a Serverless mindset with AWS as my provider of choice leveraging tools such as the Serverless Framework and AWS Amplify for full-stack projects.

Community

In 2015 I founded the NashReact Meetup Group and ran it until 2020.

In 2018 I founded Faith Leads Tech which aims to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ through a faith-based tech conference.

Organizer Nash.rb User Group (April 2013-October 2015) Organizer Nodevember Conference 2014, 2015 Organizer Code For The Kingdom Nashville Hackathon 2016

Technical Speaking

Technical Writing