Today marks my first anniversary at Amazon. This time last year, I walked into orientation in the US1 building just across from Uwajimaya; afterwards I got my badge photo taken and found my desk, one floor up. I remember that the most pressing matter was my login: I thought I was going to get “geoff“, but instead the system decided to dub me “gearnold“. Ugly! It took a week to complete the switch to something more acceptable (“arnold“), and even now that other identifier still crops up occasionally.
So what have I learned over the year? The brute facts of massive scale. The relationship between business agility and engineering compromise. Version skew as a way of life. “Q4”. The irrelevance of most formal distributed computing standards. The challenge of accommodating all kinds of business logic within a clean architecture. Harry Potter. The necessary evils of hardware load balancers. The emergent benefits of massive monitoring and instrumentation. The three dimensional vastness of our fulfillment centers. The fact that the local “Starbucks” and “Tully’s” both show up in the conference room reservation system.
It’s been a fascinating year: sometimes frustrating, always instructive. The time flew by. The opportunities are mind-boggling. And the cool thing is that we’re just getting started.