Some days in your tech career will be amazing… but a lot will not. And that’s alright. — On the day I graduated from college, one of my best friends gave me a copy of Oh, the Places You’ll Go! by Dr. Seuss. Not having grown up as a kid in the United States, I had actually managed to live 21 years without knowing who Dr. Seuss was…

Lessons learned over 25 years of testing software at Microsoft, Amazon and Google — Back at Amazon (where I worked 2009–2020), occasionally, a poor unsuspecting soul would mention the dreaded words code coverage in one of the large internal discussion groups. Every single time, these two seemingly innocent words would start a holy war with passions flaring in a fashion comparable to “vi versus…

How cherishing their accomplishments accelerated my own career growth — “Why did that moron get promoted and I didn’t???” Tell me you’ve never thought that. I’m sure you have at some point in your career. I’ve thought it plenty of times. It was so toxic. …

The evolution of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment at Amazon in the 2010s — When I started working at Amazon in 2009, our build-test-deploy practices were pretty casual. I ended up spending over 11 years there, the majority of that time as a Principal Engineer in the organization that helped the company made a radical shift to CI/CD. …

The story of marrying a Profiler and a Load Generator at Amazon — For the last 5 years, I’ve lived in a quaint town by the sea called Edmonds. Only twenty minutes north of Seattle, it very much retains its traditional small-town charm. On a sunny day, crabby old men, couples and laughing children alike stroll the sandy beach, enjoying the breathtaking views…

Stories about succeeding and failing to measure the right thing — All 3 companies that I’ve worked for in my 25 years in the industry (Google, Amazon, and Microsoft) are disciplined in gathering data and data-driven in their business decisions. …

Falling in love with coding again — Many years ago, at an Amazon offsite, we came up with tenets to articulate and perpetuate the guiding values and expectations of Principal Engineers (“PEs”) at Amazon. This is not to be confused with the more well-known Amazon Leadership Principles, which apply to all amazonians. The Amazon Principal Engineering tenets…

Ensuring Availability in AWS back in 2016 — This is the story of when I just had to open my big mouth in front of a Senior VP at Amazon, and the journey that impulsive decision put me on. Charlie Bell was an absolutely legendary figure at Amazon for nearly 24 years. You may have heard of him…

At times I grew exponentially, at other times, glacially — Why? — I was recently lurking on linkedin and noticed one of my favorite Senior Principal Engineers at Amazon had gone from Intern to Senior Principal in a decade. That’s an astonishing growth by all accounts (promoted every two years). …