About Stephen Thomas
Stephen Thomas got his first computer as a gift, and that was pretty much it — he was hooked. He spent hours upon hours writing programs in BASIC, eventually adding a tape drive, a Commodore printer, and later upgrading to the Commodore 64. By high school, he was writing software to solve his own Trigonometry and Calculus homework. His teachers probably had mixed feelings about that.
He took two years of computer science in high school, got his hands on TRS-80s and Digital Equipment PDP-11 minicomputers, and mastered BASIC and FORTRAN before most kids his age knew what a floppy disk was.
Then came Carnegie Mellon University — and wow, what a ride. Stephen studied Computer Engineering there, tackling Pascal, COBOL, C, Assembler, digital circuits, and Unix. CMU ran its own homegrown graphical network called Andrew that was light-years ahead of anything else at the time. Other universities were basically still in the Stone Age by comparison. While Stephen was there, he worked in the campus computer labs helping other students, spent summers teaching kids Logo programming on Commodore 64s at Sarah Heinz House, and even used CAD/CAM software at a machine shop to design steel parts that a Fanuc 10 milling machine would cut for Westinghouse. Not your average college job.
Oh — and he'll tell anyone who'll listen that the Commodore Amiga was the greatest personal computer ever made. The IBM PC world spent the next decade scrambling to catch up with what the Amiga was already doing natively. He stands by this firmly.
After Carnegie Mellon, Stephen went on to earn a B.S. in Digital Media & Web Technology from the University of Maryland — graduating Magna Cum Laude, Dean's List — and then came back for more, earning his Master of Science in Cloud Computing Architecture. He describes himself as a lifetime student, and honestly, his career backs that up.
These days Stephen is a seasoned AWS Solutions Architect with over 25 years of experience building secure, enterprise-grade cloud systems for some pretty serious clients — the NIH, IRS, USDA, US Secret Service, and the Department of Defense, among others. He specializes in serverless architecture, DevSecOps pipelines, and AWS GovCloud environments where the stakes are high and the compliance requirements are no joke.
He's also written 10 technical books — including the AWS Serverless Architecture Handbook, Mastering AWS Step Functions, and AWS Cognito Explained — because teaching has always been part of who he is, going all the way back to those kids learning Logo on Commodore 64s in Pittsburgh.
There's a lot more to the story, and he's just getting started writing it.
