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Does anyone know why Amazon engineers always seem to write so well? Any time I read technical content from Amazon, I am struck by how clear and concise it is.
Does anyone know why Amazon engineers always seem to write so well? Any time I read technical content from Amazon, I am struck by how clear and concise it is.
Amazon has a very strong written culture (search for 1 pagers and 6 pagers). To be effective at higher levels in any role you need to be good at it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon has a very strong written culture (search for 1 pagers and 6 pagers). To be effective at higher levels in any role you need to be good at it.
Any tips on how to get better at this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon has a very strong written culture (search for 1 pagers and 6 pagers). To be effective at higher levels in any role you need to be good at it.
Any tips on how to get better at this?
Lot of amazon content in the past week or two. What's going on? did they have a keynote or something?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon has a very strong written culture (search for 1 pagers and 6 pagers). To be effective at higher levels in any role you need to be good at it.
Any tips on how to get better at this?
But you'll get the best results by putting a lot of directed and specific practice into it. Ben Franklin wrote about his method in his autobiography. He would try to reproduce passages he admired from memory. Then he would check his work and repeat until he reproduced it verbatim. Then he would repeat but try to improve it.
Wowzer. Amazon, and in particular AWS, sits on a treasure trove of hard-earned lessons abt designing, building, operating, maintaining systems at scale. I'm glad they have began to share some of that know-how with the external world.
I wrote abt longing for AWS to do this some 6 months back [0] as I dearly missed access to those docs and videos that helped me understand so much abt the underpinnings of some of the most staunchest challenges dealt with by behemoth-esque services like S3, EC2, Redshift, DynamoDB, Kinesis, LB, Lambda, Edge, Security to name but a few.
I must point out though, re:invent does have a ARC track [1] which gives glimpses into AWS' design principles.
There's so much they could still share (for instance, abt how they track and run their operations, how they deal with service outages, how they do change management, how they continuously monitor and improve the weaker and slower parts of the systems, how they gear up for launches, how they deal with issues facing larger customers, how they go abt their design process, how they refine their internal tools and processes, the internal tech talks, the review meetings esp the one run by Charlie Bell...), and I'm glad they've committed to be doing just that.
It'd be fun comparing literature coming out of Amazon to what's published by Google et al.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20251589
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhr1KZpdzukfzSjpgH4E5...
Does anyone know why Amazon engineers always seem to write so well? Any time I read technical content from Amazon, I am struck by how clear and concise it is.
(I worked there 2006-2016)