Pointer: What Current & Future Engineering Leaders Read

Building And Operating A Pretty Big Storage System Called S3

- Werner Vogels

tl;dr: A repost of an article by Andy Warfield, VP of S3, reflects on the vast complexity and operational scale of Amazon's storage software system. Andy discusses the significance of recognizing and mitigating organizational scaling issues, similar to optimizing systems. He also discusses management’s approach to foster team ownership for problem-solving instead of dispensing solutions has led to more engaged and successful engineering outcomes.

featured in #436

I Took A Job At Amazon, Only To Leave After 10 Months

- Ben Adam

CareerAdvice
Amazon

tl;dr: "When you operate at this type of scale, centralization is the enemy of efficiency. This is a paradox. Being efficient on a macro level requires being (very) inefficient at the micro level." Ben discusses the implications of this in - documentation is essential, teams are fragile and suffer from churn, everything is urgent and takes forever, everything is built in house.

featured in #280

Amazon's Bezos Says Three Good Decisions a Day 'Enough' (Video)

tl;dr: As a senior exec you get to make a few decisions a day so getting 8 hours of sleep and organizing "high IQ" meetings earlier both help to make good a few decisions.

featured in #236

Bye, Amazon

- Tim Bray

Amazon
IndustryNews

tl;dr: Tim resigned his role at Amazon in protest of the company's mistreatment of warehouse workers. He cites the critical role of power balances. Employees at AWS are not mistreated nor considered disposable the way warehouse workers are.

featured in #181

Why Learning to Code Alexa Skills is the Gateway to a Cloud Computing Job

- Drew Firment

featured in #113.1

Amazon Rekognition – Image Detection and Recognition Powered by Deep Learning

- Jeff Barr