Testimonials
Kind words from clients, readers and colleagues.
Care to add yours to the list? Thank-you! Email me at paul@serverlessfirst.com.
Paul started adding value to the team virtually immediately. I feel the upfront discovery work and the report was probably a key part of that. It allowed us to agree clear joint objectives and focus in on priority areas quickly – something I think we have managed to continue doing, on a quarterly basis.
One major benefit is the fact that Paul engages, advises, educates and unblocks our other devs (both internal and external) virtually on a daily basis.
I would 100% recommend Paul's services. Simply put, he delivers.
The main takeaway from our engagement was confidence.
The value of having an expert who is enjoyable to work with and capable of providing real-world guidance and advice is immense. Paul’s ability to review our solution and process and instill confidence in our work (or help address any risks) is highly valuable.
From Paul’s blog posts it was clear we were bringing someone in who could bring us from zero to hero.
Once we started working with him, we got what we expected and more. Things don’t stay static in tech and this was especially true of Serverless - AWS is continually improving and updating existing services and adding new ones. We didn’t want to be fighting the technology, we needed to deliver value for our projects and Paul helped us keep that balance.
Paul’s focus on developer experience was probably the thing I most liked about his work with us. We frequently needed to onboard new team members and handoff projects to internal teams and this was key to long term success of projects. He raised the bar for our team, in many ways we’ve surpassed our previous stack in terms of IaC, CI/CD and testing.
Paul knows his stuff and instantly had respect of all team members and leadership. Very diplomatic, change is not easy for all. Was professional at all times. Our team literally went from nothing on AWS and Serverless to feeling like there is not much we can’t do.
Looking forward to our next engagement with him.
Working with Paul was one of the best decisions we’ve made for our app! We knew going with a serverless architecture would be the best approach for our app, but due to a lack of experience, we wanted help from someone who was a subject matter expert in this field.
I now have a lot better sense of how to build out our application’s infrastructure and I have the peace of mind that we are doing things in a secure, scalable way and won’t waste hours of development work implementing a sub optimal solution.
Paul did a great job of explaining key serverless concepts, recommending the appropriate architecture for us, complete with all the AWS services to use, and how to tie them together, and he dove into our business-critical workflows with us to make sure we knew how to implement each one within a serverless context.
I also liked how human the interactions felt, as opposed to something very transactional or business-like. Yes, Paul is running a business but at no point in our interaction did I feel like I was just another “client” to him or an afterthought. He took his time to answer all my questions, tailor his recommendations to our specific use cases, and showed a genuine interest in our project and organization. And I feel like I have “someone in my corner” that I can go to for help with future engagements, should I need it. Highly recommend working with Paul for your next serverless application!
Paul helped us transition our existing AppSync app away from Amplify CLI and manually created cloud resources to using the Serverless Framework. After a bit of hard work and help, we are comfortable with both decisions and feel they will be critical to our success.
Paul has a deep understanding of industry best practices that goes beyond knowing the right thing to do. He pragmatically adapts to your immediate needs. He quickly understood the project and our business goals and he let us know when complexity was unwarranted and work was premature.
I feel much more confident after the call that my application can be developed with serverless in mind, using the services that I was planning on using plus a few more.
I have chosen to use Serverless for a new startup I’m working on and I’m fairly new to it so I wanted to talk through some of the architectural decisions with an expert.
We talked through how to implement a specific workflow of my application using serverless, as well as ways to attack some of the trickier use cases in a straightforward manner. After the meeting, Paul sent me some resources that I can refer to in the future which will prove immensely beneficial. Well worth it!
I’m so glad I took this workshop!
I was able to apply many of the testing techniques as well as some larger architectural patterns to my professional and personal projects.
Paul was a great teacher with deep knowledge of Serverless testing and applications as a whole.
The other students were also very engaged which led to lots of productive discussions during the sessions.
While the main focus of the workshop of course was testing - which was thoroughly delivered with great insight and immediately useful techniques - I also really enjoyed that we worked with a realistic and high quality sample codebase packed with typical architectural patterns including auth, queues, event buses and streams.
I learned a lot from attending this workshop.
Paul is one of the few developers that are able to make a BIG impact in a short period of time, single handedly worked on re-developing our mobile version of autoTRADER.ca which launched in record time as a fantastic success.
It was important to build a functional proof of concept and create early architecture that would allow us to establish the project’s viability as quickly as possible, and we were aware that Paul had a practical working knowledge of modern javascript frameworks and AWS infrastructure we were planning to use.
The proof of concept was a success. We have continued to build the product and have committed more internal effort to it on the way to its release.
Paul’s early work on the site architecture has proved invaluable and he created excellent handover materials that the development team have been able to use during key decision making phases and add to them as and when required. He also provided useful advice on modern javascript best practices and improvements as we worked toward refactoring earlier work.
Overall Paul is just a good person to have on the team, even if it is just for a short while. He’s honest and realistic about what can be achieved with his help, which was invaluable to both project management and system design in our tight project timescale. He worked with the other developers to solve issues and articulated potential long-term issues so that we could avoid them in the future. He ensured that we had sufficient handover documentation which was greatly appreciated.
Paul made a massive impact on the BBC Rewind project and the results of his work can be seen in archive content now being published across many of the BBC’s broadcast services. He was the architect of the Rewind Portal, a new archive search tool which gives BBC journalists and programme-makers faster and easier access to the Corporation’s largely untapped digitised archive.
His great ability for design and problem solving combined with his natural understanding of good UX and an eye for aesthetics allowed him to produce excellent results when faced with this challenging and complex project. Paul’s approachable style meant he was able to engage effectively with users of the Rewind Portal, dealing with feedback in a constructive and intelligent way.
Always a pleasure to work with and highly talented, I would strongly recommend Paul’s services to any project team.
If you’d like me to help your company get results like these, check out the consulting services I offer. You can also check out my case studies page to see in more detail how I’ve helped some of these clients.