A note from Gracie: This post has been updated to give due recognition to a certain serverless champion who was helpful in creating this list and is well-worth a follow in her own right! Read on for our seventh serverless champion you should start know!

There are so many early serverless adopters and pioneers who many of us in the community know well: AWS heroes, in-demand speakers, and celebrated community organizers with thousands of followers, popular Twitch channels, and full speaking dockets. It's a fantastic idea to follow these folks because they are known for a reason.We cover them regularly at Stackery!

But, as in any community, there are also MANY serverless users, enthusiasts, and quiet champions who deserve recognition as well. As we've written about before, serverless at its core is about delivering real business value with modern software and distributing computing power down to the customer. This core tenet makes humility a top value in the serverless community, which amplifies the "quiet champion" phenomenon in our realm, specifically.

Since humble figures aren't the first to seek a huge organic following or "influencer" status, it's up to others to celebrate them. To that end, I wanted to highlight six people who are key parts of the serverless community who aren't particularly widely followed but perhaps should be!

Tom McLaughlin

Tom is a tireless participant and booster of the serverless mindset and supporter of new developers in serverless.

https://twitter.com/tmclaughbos

Things I don't enjoy doing:

* Snaking through code across multiple files to figure WTF the resulting infrastructure will be.#serverless

— Tom McLaughlin - Serverless Lifestyle Brand (@tmclaughbos) March 3, 2020

Praneeta Prakash

One of the developers on AWS SAM, Praneeta posts thoughtful updates on the product, engages with the community, and fun nerdy projects in about equal measure.

https://twitter.com/praneetaprakash

Okay, I know we made some of these bugs ourselves...but job security, amiright? Bunch of fixes coming up in this NEW release! Also, #UsagePlans now supported, and a super cool community contribution to force update lambda versions #AWS #SAM #Serverless https://t.co/wvhksPJhf7 pic.twitter.com/hYCkOPjPQm

— Praneeta Prakash (@praneetaprakash) February 21, 2020

James Hood

James is another developer on AWS SAM, and his twitter feed is mainly insights into how teams within AWS are thinking about their products. It's extremely useful to understand how the dev teams are imagining their products will be used, and how they plan to grow!

https://twitter.com/jlhcoder

Brain wouldn’t let me sleep last night. The downside to a creative job like software development is you can’t usually control when inspiration hits. On the bright side, I think I nailed down some key parts of this design I’m working on. pic.twitter.com/wZXM2s6yly

— James Hood (@jlhcoder) April 16, 2020

Brett Andrews

Brett has recently departed AWS (oh the pains of picking a Twitter Username to mesh with your current job!) and continues to write really great posts on developer culture

https://twitter.com/AWSbrett

Working with a team that's struggling to get PRs reviewed in a timely fashion, and it was mentioned that people feel like it's a tedious chore.

I'm weird and really enjoy doing code reviews.

What can you do to change this perception? 🤔

— Brett Andrews (@AWSbrett) March 3, 2020

Danielle Heberling

Danielle is a great co-worker at Stackery and an incredibly dynamic member of the serverless community. A recent winner of the AWS Hackathon here in Portland, her twitter combines tech snark, community building, and cool nerdy projects. I respect Danielle for the degree to which she has recognized other members of the tech community throughout all stages of her career. She is a great mentor to seek out, even if it's via a simple follow on social!

https://twitter.com/deeheber

My talk from @ServerlessN is up. Check it out. https://t.co/iYMT9AsvcY

— Danielle Heberling (@deeheber) March 7, 2020

Beth North

Beth writes evocatively about vulnerability and the feelings associated with tech. She gave a great talk at Serverlessdays Cardiff and is definitely worth a follow.

https://twitter.com/EccentricTester

I'm intrigued. Do you have a backup career for when you rage quit tech? Like, I just want to open a bakery when I leave...

— Beth North (@EccentricTester) March 9, 2020

Nica Fee

Last but not least, Nica Fee is a longstanding serverless champion that you should follow immediately if you’re not already doing so. Not only did she help put this list together, but she’s been been an advocate of Stackery and a serverless enthusiast since early days. She’s now a developer advocate at New Relic where she focuses on serverless. Lucky them!

Her feed is full of tips for beginning-advanced developers, helpful input and suggestions for our growing community, and general hilarity. She’s also a prolific long form writer for publications like The New Stack — and yes, the Stackery blog! She also makes a practice out of spotlighting folks in the serverless community who might not be the most well known, but deserve applause.

Just got a talk accepted at a DevOps conference that will occur in Animal Crossing. Which means I can now experience the impossible dream of writing Animal Crossing off on my taxes https://t.co/lU1eYVsic3

— Nočnica Fee (@NocnicaFee) April 17, 2020

Head over to these champions' Twitter feeds today to get the true inside scoop on what's going on (and coming up!) in serverless and -- and give them a follow if you feel so inclined. Selfishly, you'll get to say that you followed them when they were cult before classic!