The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon

The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon
chrislaing.net

The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything." You can't just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate -- ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If you delay it, it'll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can't cheat. You can't have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the hard problems up front.

Imagine you are a newbie who just joined a project that has successfully done what Jeff said in the memo. The success of undertaking that would have meant that your colleagues will want to continue doing this (threat of firing or not :) ) and pretty soon you'll get sucked into it and hopefully see the rewards of such design.

Soon, another team notices your team consistently getting things right and getting rewards so they have an incentive to follow (social proof). This becomes department wide next and so on. This is where momentum comes into picture. It is 2015 (let's say) and there are a dozen new departments. All of them reasonably want to get going quickly so they take up patterns that worked for other in the org. 6 more years pass by with more successes and there's no real incentive (at-least org-wide) to do something different to the one that works. My educated guess: The memo is still followed.

I imagine now that somewhere in amazon there is a "qsort" REST API that does all the sorting.