One Amazon Year

De­cem­ber first made it a year here at Ama­zon Vancouver’s en­gi­neer­ing cas­tle in the sky. I’m work­ing with good peo­ple in a cool of­fice on in­ter­est­ing stuff. It’s at the white-hot cen­ter of server-side com­put­ing but sur­pris­ing­ly un­sur­pris­ing.

Mak­ing vs talk­ing · It turns out that build­ing and ship­ping non­triv­ial soft­ware is a lot hard­er work than evan­ge­liz­ing it and writ­ing about it. I come home aw­ful­ly damn tired some days.

I’m less en­gaged in the In­ter­net con­ver­sa­tion and miss that some, but I’ve tast­ed more of that joy than al­most any­one. And then the ac­tu­al stuff I’m work­ing on  —  making AWS more use­ful while keep­ing it re­li­able  —  is so blind­ing­ly ob­vi­ous that it doesn’t re­al­ly need evan­ge­liz­ing.

Yeah, com­put­ing is mov­ing to a util­i­ty mod­el. Yeah, you can do all sorts of things in a pub­lic cloud that are too hard or too ex­pen­sive in your own com­put­er room. Yeah, the public-cloud op­er­a­tors are go­ing to pro­vide way bet­ter up­ti­me, se­cu­ri­ty, and dis­tri­bu­tion than you can build your­self. And yeah, there was a Tues­day in last week.

Be­hind the scenes · Keep­ing all the world’s in­fras­truc­ture on the air is a ton of work. Every day you have to bal­ance risk re­duc­tion with ship­ping fea­tures. Bear­ing cloud growth rates in mind, 2018’s load could be 5× or 10× today’s. Thus we bet­ter be treat­ing any cur­rent in­fras­truc­ture creaks as Job Zero, and screw the shiny new.

But the high-tech biz has been all shiny-new all the time. Me, I think be­ing re­li­able and avail­able and fast in ex­change for a month­ly usage-based bill is the shini­est, new or not. Which is why I’ll nev­er be a prod­uct man­ager.

What I do · I have a grandiose ti­tle and no­body can re­al­ly tell me what to do, ex­cept for there are a mil­lion rea­son­able re­quests for help I re­al­ly shouldn’t turn down, each an op­por­tu­ni­ty to feel bad about things fall­en by the wayside. For­tu­nate­ly I learned to ig­nore triage guilt a cou­ple decades ago.

I get a few hours here and there to code, and thus a fun­ny sto­ry: Some­times my code-review re­quests came back with po­lite WTF’s about things that look like am­a­teur­ish ig­no­rance of ob­vi­ous best prac­tices. Fi­nal­ly some­one asked why I was os­ten­ta­tious­ly ig­nor­ing the com­mon wis­dom. So I shared the aw­ful truth that in my lengthy ca­reer I had nev­er pre­vi­ous­ly writ­ten a sin­gle line of server-side Java. The si­lence that fell on the email thread was pal­pa­ble.

But hey, at the end of the day, the server-side is all about message-exchange pat­terns and pay­load de­sign and buy­ing scale with sub­lin­ear al­go­rithm­s, and I do know some stuff about that stuff.

So un­less some­thing goes ter­ri­bly wrong in the next few week­s, some T.Bray code will soon be at work at scale, fa­cil­i­tat­ing the Cloud­i­fi­ca­tion of on­line prop­er­ties you spend time with.

How I feel · Cor­po­rate­ly, I’m a burnout. I’ve co-founded two star­tups and worked for Sun and Google; most would see that as a trip through the Good Bits Of Cap­i­tal­is­m. Stil­l, I’m not a be­liev­er.

It’s stim­u­lat­ing to work for Ama­zon, which is ap­prox­i­mate­ly the most in­ter­est­ing com­pa­ny in the world by a fac­tor of two. First, the pur­suit of re­tail ubiquity; I won’t say at all cost­s, but with cheer­ful dis­re­gard for cer­tain ra­tios thought im­por­tant in the (de­testable) fi­nance biz. Se­cond, the whole­sale re­place­ment of on-premise com­put­ing with Cloud­stuff.

But at the end of the day, it’s a job, which is to say a fi­nan­cial trans­ac­tion. My em­ploy­er re­wards me fair­ly, mak­ing a bet that what I help build will pay off for them. In ex­change, I’ll work hard to help build things that do that.

But will I ac­tu­al­ly care? Enough to sac­ri­fice fam­i­ly time or per­son­al time or cottage-life time? Wel­l, some­times; when I’m con­vinced the work will touch people’s lives  —  especially my software-tribe peers’  —  in a good way.

My whole career’s been blessed by luck. This feels like more. Don’t think I’m not grate­ful.

An­niver­sary res­o­lu­tion · To­day, I tried switch­ing my com­mute from bike-train-walk to bike-all-the-way. It’s re­fresh­ing, and just as quick; but we’ll see how my legs feel hold up.

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