50 articles, 100k reads, 15k readers
The backstory of how I started and grew this blog, and what I learned in the process
When I was a kid, I was an avid reader. I’d spend my summers in my grandpa’s cottage by the river, and being a bookworm, my favorite activity was bringing a giant stack of books, and reading them on a hammock between two fragrant guava trees. It was an idyllic setting where I spent countless lazy summer afternoons daydreaming about adventures as I devoured whatever Jules Verne, Emilio Salgari, Mark Twain or Agatha Christie books I had managed to scrounge from my local library. Inspired by all that reading, I commandeered my dad’s Smith Corona typewriter and wrote incessantly. I was sure I was going to be a famous writer when I grew up. I was going to travel the world, have adventures in exotic lands, and write all about it.
Then I met my other love, a Czerweny CZ-1000, essentially a South American knockoff of the venerable Sinclair ZX-81, and I was introduced to the world of programming BASIC in the eighties. And a more sensible career choice appeared, as I was probably a couple of centuries too late to be a great explorer of faraway lands.
I was fascinated by the dichotomy between the soft rubber keys of my Czerweny and the harsh mechanical thuds of my Smith Corona.
Eventually, coding won. I came to the US, studied Computer Science more formally in college, got a job at Microsoft in the nineties, spent 11 years there, spent another 11 years at Amazon, and have been at Google for over 3 years now.
And so I forgot I was supposed to be a writer and an adventurer. I still have my dad’s Smith Corona, and occasionally run my fingers through it, still feeling a connection to a world and a life that never fully was.
Fast forward to April of 2020. That was about the time we all realized that covid was going to change our lives. It wasn’t just one more scare like SARS or MERS. It was the real deal. I watched in horror as the morgues of New York, Spain and Italy filled with casualties. Some friends got sick. Some died. We all hunkered down in our homes. For the first time in my life, I contemplated my own mortality in a very real way.
One night I couldn’t sleep, I started writing. And I wrote. Wrote, wrote, wrote, well into the night. Went back to my first love. Before ‘10 PRINT “Hello World!”’ and ‘20 GOTO 10' changed my destiny. I didn’t write for anybody in particular other than for myself.
I never lived a life of the adventures I had envisioned when I was a kid, fighting pirates, exploring jungles or discovering an ancient tomb. But I did, in retrospect, live a life of adventure. I was an immigrant that came to this country with a hundred bucks, a suitcase and a dream. I found myself at Microsoft, the epicenter and evil overlord of computing in the nineties, pulled all-nighters for Bill Gates, made and lost my first million dollars by age 25, suffered through the antitrust case, and watched Microsoft’s painful decline into oblivion during the Ballmer years. I didn’t know I was living history, but in retrospect those 11 years were fascinating. Then, I somehow ended up at Amazon where I had a front row seat to its spectacular meteoric rise from a tiny scrappy little company fighting to survive to a trillion dollar behemoth. I found at Amazon what I hadn’t found at the stale Microsoft: a very fast pace environment that welcomed hunger, some risk taking and big thinking, and so my career grew as exponentially as the company itself. There, I also didn’t realize I was living history, but like in the previous case, in retrospect those 11 years were fascinating too. I was hired when Amazon was 3000 engineers, and left when it was 60,000, with a front-row seat to an interesting inflection point. And lastly, finding myself at Google during the pandemic, I started realizing just how many stories I had to write. And so I wrote them, just for myself, in a googledoc, night after night.
As covid wreaked havoc in the world, there was another grim thought that popped up in my head. What if I didn’t make it? This wasn’t just a hypothetical, but it was very personal. My dad had suddenly passed away when I was 13. There was so much about him and his life that I never got to know. As an adult, I’ve pieced together parts of his life from talking to my mom, my aunts, his friends. But I wish I had more. A few years ago I went back to Argentina to sell my childhood home, and cleaning up the attic I found all his writings. I read them every night for months, feeling a deeper connection with him. When you write, a piece of you is transferred to that piece of paper and lives forever. My writing was a way to capture my life experiences and perhaps have them transcend my own mortality. Maybe one day, long after I’m gone, my sons will read my writings and will too feel a connection to their dad they didn’t even know they had.
And so I began posting my stories, not for any particular reason, but simply because I yearned to write. I didn’t have an agenda. It was not for income, as I very purposely marked them as “Free” and I don’t make a dime out of them. I wanted anybody to be able to read them without having to pay. I didn’t want to fall into the social media trap of “how many people are liking my post,” but when people started to like them, and comment on them, writing went from being something I did in the solitude of my spare bedroom after my family went to bed to an interactive activity that connected me to the world, during a time we were all disconnected from the world.
I’m a data nerd, and I enjoyed that Medium shows you basic statistics like likes and reads. Some stories went viral and had thousands of reads, others weren’t particularly popular (but I liked them anyways!). Medium also shows you parts of your blog that others have highlighted, which was a fascinating insight into people.
The stories are a mix of anecdotes that I find amusing or interesting, but I tried to also to have some kind of takeaway or value or lesson my story taught me. Hopefully you get a thing or two of value reading them!
I wrote a few stories about my life before work. Then, I wrote about my life at Microsoft (1997–2009), Amazon (2009–2020) and Google (2020-present).
- [1987] How I Started Coding When I Was 11 Years Old
- [1993] Coming to America — life of an immigrant
- [1997] My Unusual Path To Microsoft in the Nineties
- [1997] Memories from working at Microsoft in the nineties
- [1998] How we automagically recognized human languages in MS Word
- [1999] Bunnies and Bees, patenting at Microsoft
- [2000] How I made, and lost, a million dollars before my 25th birthday
- [2001] The Night I Pulled an All-Nighter for Bill Gates
- [2002] I Was a Terrible Manager (Not 1, Not 2, but 3 Times)
- [2003] On almost being fired at Microsoft
- [2009] The day I lost my job at Microsoft
- [2022] Getting the team together… 25 years later
- [2009] Sometimes you just need to take a leap of faith
- [2012] When Cats Look at Themselves in a Mirror they See Lions
- [2012] The Day My Mistake Brought Down Amazon.com
- [2013] How I tripled load in Production for testing purposes at Amazon…
- [2013] A tale of Elephants — How I impacted thousands at Amazon
- [2013] The day Jeff Bezos Gave Me a Giant Shoe
- [2013] How I Rewrote My Job Description (Over and Over Again) At Amazon
- [2014] Classloaders to the Rescue!
- [2014] Amazon’s Not So Secret Weapon — Working backwards
- [2014] The “Coke Paradigm”
- [2014] Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom
- [2014] Baking is for cookies (not code)
- [2014] How Deadlines Fast-Tracked my Career at Amazon
- [2014] How could teams with high code coverage have high operational load???
- [2015] Trailblazing in an often under-appreciated role
- [2015] The Great Code Coverage Holy Wars of the 21st Century
- [2015] Belonging to Amazon’s Principal Engineering Community
- [2016] Not all achievements in a software company are technical
- [2016] When the canary stops singing…
- [2017] The Day I *Almost* Rage-Quit Amazon
- [2018] Memoirs of an Amazon Bar Raiser
- [2018] You got peanut butter in my chocolate!
- [2019] The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: watching my code evolve over a decade
- [2019] Trials and Tribulations of Load Testing Amazon.com for a Decade
- [2019] The Importance of Story-Telling in Software Engineering
- [2020] My Amazon Reptilian Brain
- [2020] Looking for a job as a Principal Engineer during a pandemic
- [2020] Belonging to a place I’d never been
- [2021] The things I love about Google are the things I dislike about Google
- [2022] The importance of being an Exemplary Practitioner
- [2023] A rude awakening — The Big Tech Layoffs
Some stories don’t really belong within a particular timeframe in my life, or span large parts of my life:
- Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
- Career Growth Speed, Deconstructed
- The Fallacy of the Self-Made
- Why Sponsorship from Senior Engineers matters
- Celebrate other people’s victories!
- Blood, grit, sweat, tears and quiet leadership
- What I learn about Software Engineering from a 60-yr old French car
- The Paradigm Shifts with Different Dev:Test Ratios
The most popular ones
I don’t love to use popularity as a measure of quality, but nevertheless it was interesting to see what appealed to random people in the world:
- The things I love about Google are the things I dislike about Google
[10.5k reads] - The day I lost my job at Microsoft
[9.5k reads] - Belonging to Amazon’s Principal Engineering Community
[8.6k reads] - The Day I *Almost* Rage-Quit Amazon
[6.7k reads] - Memoirs of an Amazon Bar Raiser
[6.6k reads] - The Night I Pulled an All-Nighter for Bill Gates
[4.3k reads] - Looking for a job as a Principal Engineer during a pandemic
[4.3k reads] - I Was a Terrible Manager (Not 1, Not 2, but 3 Times)
[3.1k reads] - Amazon’s Not So Secret Weapon
[3.1k reads] - My Amazon Reptilian Brain
[2.6k reads]
The least popular ones
As a parent, you love all your children equally, right? Maybe your kid will end up creating the new billion dollar company, curing cancer, winning the Nobel price, flipping burgers at McDonald’s, being a greeter at Walmart, or in jail for murder, but they’re all your favorite.
- How we automagically recognized human languages in Microsoft Word
[208 reads] - Not all achievements in a software company are technical
[255 reads] - How I Started Coding When I Was 11 Years Old
[274 reads] - Blood, grit, sweat, tears and quiet leadership
[274 reads] - The “Coke Paradigm”
[274 reads] - Celebrate other people’s victories!
[285 reads] - Baking is for cookies (not code)
[327 reads] - What I learn about Software Engineering from a 60-yr old French car
[400 reads] - How could teams with high code coverage have high operational load???
[413 reads] - Coming to America- life of an immigrant
[457 reads]
To be honest, these are some of my favorite stories, so I think they’re under-rated (and the popular ones are over-rated). Some of these have pretty critical take-aways, particularly for more junior engineers. Check them out!