Nikko is building out of Manila, in the Philippines, and his motto is three words long: Learn, Build, Lead.
When he first joined NextWork, he was an absolute beginner. He was also studying for a Computer Programming degree, and he balanced his projects with that degree the whole way through. From his very first project, he shared everything he built.
Every project, in public
Nikko posted every project he finished on LinkedIn. His early ones were a static website, an analytics dashboard and a chatbot - and on the chatbot, he hit a fallback-response error and debugged it himself before writing it up.
Once he had the foundations down, he kept raising the difficulty. He built a serverless data pipeline that handles more than 100,000 events a day at 98.9% uptime, a computer vision security monitor trained on SageMaker, and a reusable infrastructure-as-code framework that cut deploy time from hours down to minutes.
These days he writes projects for other learners, too, including one on setting up a Hermes AI agent.
From speaker to organizer
Nikko talked about what he was learning from the start, first as a speaker at community events and then as the person running them.
At AWS Community Day Philippines he ran a stall dedicated to NextWork and pitched it more than 1,000 times over two days. As Director of SkillBuilder for AWS Cloud Club Philippines, he built a training program for university students made entirely of NextWork projects. He has been a guest speaker at more than 20 events, demoing NextWork to learners, and before he'd even graduated, he ran a 500+ person event in Manila built around NextWork projects.
Our founder Amber Winton has posted about him on LinkedIn more than once. In one clip, Nikko asks the room, "NextWork Community Philippines?", and the crowd shouts back, "WE LOVE NEXTWORK". In another, she gave him a huge shout out for leading events in the Philippines that use NextWork to upskill hundreds of people.
Still shipping
Today Nikko builds AI and automation systems, runs community events and mentors newer members - and he's still shipping projects of his own.
You can find Nikko on LinkedIn, or catch him at one of his upcoming NextWork events.
When we first shared his story with the community, Nikko said it was "such a great reminder of what we've been through over the years". It's been a great few years to watch, Nikko.