This really shows in the products Amazon offers to developers. Everything that isn’t already an entrenched business success is some random internal tooling that got productized because everything does.
The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon
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Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon
#12Always worth reading Yegge's insider take on this - https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 . 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 t…
That Gist is the source of the "email": #7 is fake and was added by Yegge as a joke.
"But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network."
This is gold :D
Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon
#13Does anyone know who else was involved in constructing this memo?
"There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever"
Was Bezos deeply enough involved in Amazon's engineering to set those rules himself, or was the text of the memo influenced by a senior engineering group that he was working with?
Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon
#14Is this the same doc as "Distributed Computing Manifesto" mentioned in Werner Vogels' blog? [1]
These legendary Amazon Memos haven't leaked, unlike Billg's various memos [2]. That is... journalistically unfortunate, I would say. I even wonder current Amazonian actually has the access to these docs.
[1] https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2019/08/modern-applicat...
[2] https://lettersofnote.com/2011/07/22/the-internet-tidal-wave...
Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon
#15Always worth reading Yegge's insider take on this - https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 . 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 t…
Background - Oct 12, 2011:
> Google engineer Steve Yegge was trying to start a robust internal discussion, not post a viral hit, when he published a 4,570-word self-styled rant about what he sees as the company’s greatest flaw to Google+. Unfortunately for Yegge, he didn’t check the settings and shared his view on Google’s failure to grasp platforms over products — including Google+ — with everyone.
> He later pulled it down on his own accord but he and Google aren’t asking that the copies already spread across the net be deleted. You can read the full post here and here, among other locations — and you should to get the real flavor about why Yegge thinks the company that does nearly everything right gets this fundamental so wrong. But a large chunk is also about his former employer Amazon, what it does wrong and how Jeff Bezos — Steve Jobs “without the fashion or design sense” — got it so right.
Source: https://gigaom.com/2011/10/12/419-the-biggest-thing-amazon-g... (Note, I think the post I'm citing might be incomplete as on my screen it stops at "Playstation Network" while the Gist continues...)
Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon
#16So Amazon has no teams that write simple libraries for other teams? I imagine now that somewhere in amazon there is a "qsort" REST API that does all the sorting.
Libraries exist, too. The glib example is pre-built clients for all those services, but there are also things like retry helpers.
Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon
#17> Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.
> Thank you; have a nice day!
What a colossal twat.
Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon
#18Is this actually still applied in 2021? Most memos from two decades ago aren't still followed.
> Is this actually still applied in 2021?
Yes, absolutely. Arguably even more so now that Lambda and ECS/Fargate have reduced the cost of standing up a simple service.
Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon
#19Always worth reading Yegge's insider take on this - https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 . 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 t…
That Gist is the source of the "email": #7 is fake and was added by Yegge as a joke.
“Jeff Bezos doesn’t give a f*ck about your day”. I still laugh at that.
Re: The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon
#20> Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. > Thank you; have a nice day! What a colossal twat.
It's really easy to be a nice guy by reacting the way you did, but if the quote above is real, it should be studied and celebrated.
Let me break it down for you - Amazon bet the farm on this strategy and it worked out amazingly. Not following this strategy is equivalent to sabotaging the most important thing the company is doing.
While I suspect this quote is tongue in cheek, it SHOULD be a fire able offense for someone to ignore company strategy because "they know better" or are too lazy or whatever.