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Employee #1: Amazon

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Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#111

Post by napworth »

DonHopkins wrote: post #105
skaphan wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was used only in the form of Emacs Lisp, as a set of tools for customer service folks to make replying to typical email easier for them. They pretty much built all that themselves (and they didn't start out as programmers).

How do you do, fellow Kaleidan [1]? We worked together with Eric Benson and Dan Bornstein on ScriptX [2], which was basically Lisp with objects instead of parenthesis. I found ScriptX quite useful for web programming [3]: "Link Globally, Interact Locally"! ScriptX's legacy lives on: After Kaleida shut down, John Wainwright, the architect of ScriptX, created a very similar language called MaxScript [4] for 3D Studio M…

+1 for Don. Thanks for all your hard work on The Sims!

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#112

Post by spdionis »

paulddraper wrote: post #84
towndrunk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it has definitely been a positive development for my wife and I." Seriously? Just curious... what age range are you in?

Were you asking because of his interests or because of his grammar?

What's wrong with his grammar?

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#113

Post by retromario »

berntb wrote: post #107
0xmohit wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Surprisingly, some people couldn't get the answer right even using Google. Never underestimate anybody. I've seen numerous examples wherein folks would copy/paste an obviously inferior answer (or even incorrect) from a Stack Overflow post that contains a much better answer.

This rings a bell right now. :-) Last week I integrated with a service using (shudder) SOAP. I tried the XML call with curl and couldn't get it to work. I cursed, I frothed. The reply error was some Java dump, not helpful. It took me embarrassingly long to realize I got the HTTP header fields for SOAP from something wrong I googled -- it worked when I copied the header line from old code I wrote before... :-) :-(

My approach with Stack Overflow is to never copy-paste but always re-type by hand. This forces me to understand each line of code and its behavior (and double-check any errors). I can't recommend this enough.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#114

Post by afarrell »

towndrunk wrote: post #24
afarrell wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People, or at least children, have been running around in parks trying to catch invisible animals for decades. As adults, it has definitely been a positive development for my wife and I.

"it has definitely been a positive development for my wife and I." Seriously? Just curious... what age range are you in?

Also, this past year the morning of our anniversary, I had hidden 150 pokemon stickers inside easter eggs around our apartment complex as a surprise for my wife. We spent the day with me watching her find them and checking them off my list of locations. Fun things are fun.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#115

Post by BatFastard »

bbcbasic wrote: post #98
BatFastard wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I got down voted on this for WHAT reason?

Maybe because you are just guessing. Anyone can do that.

I find there is a huge difference between the guess of people with knowledge, and people who are pulling things out of their ass. Considering I have held a number of CTO jobs, my guess'es are much better then most peoples.

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#116

Post by DonHopkins »

gumby wrote: post #13
AstralStorm wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beautiful example of Peter principle and how to promote someone into uselessness and inefficacy.

I wouldn't call that the Peter Principle; he wasn't promoted above his skill set (per se) due to things like time in grade, which is what Laurence Peter wrote about. In the Peter Principle book the person causes damage through having responsibility without the ability to execute in that particular role. As others mentioned it was more a great way to reward someone who now didn't really have a specific spot. This is f…

John Gage's [1] title at Sun was "Science Officer". But he sure did a lot of cool useful Official Science Stuff. He was also on Richard Nixon's Enemy List, which is the kind of community service experience that I am always impressed to see on a resume.

At Sun, if they didn't actually want an executive to continue working for the company, they'd promote them to Vice President of Looking for a New Job.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gage

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#117

Post by DonHopkins »

AstralStorm wrote: post #4
0xmohit wrote: post #2

This is interesting: Craig: Had you and Jeff stayed close? Shel: Not really. When he replaced me in my original job and I was moved into the CTO slot, I was nominally in charge of architecture, but in fact that just meant rubber stamping projects that were 95% complete by the time I saw them. That was all after having told me that my job was mine as long as I wanted it. And I didn’t have resources other than myself t…

Beautiful example of Peter principle and how to promote someone into uselessness and inefficacy.

I chuckled when I saw that question.

Beautiful example of being tactful enough not to reply "No fucking way would I want to stay close to that psycho!"

Re: Employee #1: Amazon

#118

Post by nocarrier »

skaphan wrote: post #47
nocarrier wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was more Lisp influence than just the CS macros you mention here. Eric Benson was a major contributor to Lucid Emacs and many early Amazon engineers had Lisp experience. SICP was practically issued to every new software engineer--it was that popular. The template language for Amazon's website at the time (catsubst) was a Lisp-inspired prefix notation language with a relatively small number of functions. For exa…

EB and I both worked at Lucid, which produced a Common Lisp system, not to my knowledge a version of Emacs (though maybe so after I left in 1989?). Some other early employees knew and liked Lisp, but we didn't use it on any core functionality. The text substitution logic you mention, that I wrote, was really simple and not particularly Lisp-like. Though again, after I handed it off, who knows what happened.

Lucid Emacs -> Xemacs was mentioned in a sibling comment, but I remember people being in awe about EB working on those. There were many interesting employees back then--J. Chenault, J. Gehlen, R. Braumeller, F. Eiden, K. Sears, etc. I've lost touch with most of them but I learned a lot from them.

I started in October 1997 and did Perl work on backend systems, but I had a few friends who worked on the frontend. They used to talk about how Catsubst had a very small set of verbs and that everything was a function, even arithmetic, and that prefix notation was used for all macro calls. They thought it was Lisp-inspired, but they were also pretty junior programmers too. I never worked with Catsubst myself, so my information is second-hand, while yours is zero-hand since you wrote it. :-)

Thanks for all the work you did on Amazon's infra!

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