51–60 of 136 posts
> Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired. > Thank you; have a nice day! What a colossal twat.
The point was that this was not up for discussion. Sure, there are less twatty ways of phrasing it, but at least you know where you stand.
Always 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…
Hey do these other platforms have developer support? Developer support is sort of the accessibility for developers - Google doesn't have it. MS definitely has it. I'm thinking Amazon does too but I try to avoid them.
> 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 some…
Dont agree with what the bossman said?: "You're fired!"
And the people love it so much, they even democratically elected the poster child of that catchphrase.
So how does Amazon manage this btw? I don't find AWS SDKs to be all that consistent or inconsistent. They are usually good _enough_. Is that all it takes?
By contrast, Google seems to spend a lot of time on their single repo, build the world, approach. For the most part it seems beloved, or at least people try to recreate it outside google with things like Bazel.
I feel like Google's approach is more popularized. Is that because its actually better, just advertised more, or simply consistent enough to explain?
Can anyone shed light on Amazon's approach?
Does it include e.g. the team writing the on-device text renderer for a Kindle? What would such a service interface look like?
I've always wondered how far this extends: "All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces." Does it include e.g. the team writing the on-device text renderer for a Kindle? What would such a service interface look like?
Does 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 worki…
Does 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 worki…
> All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. I wonder how this is accomplished for event driven architectures built on shared event buses.
How far does this principle scale? I've heard of this strategy and thought "that's kinda cool." Amazon is obviously successful in its domain, so it would be easy to assume some causality. And yet, there's another big tech company, fruit symbol I think, that has played the long game of continually fine tuning the interaction points to make the integration of their parts more than the whole. They get credit for attenti…
I think this principle scales most to platforms, in this case web ones.
There's an interesting thing called the "Bill Gates line": https://stratechery.com/2018/the-bill-gates-line/ (third sub-heading in the article). Basically: "A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform."
From your example, the Fruit Company is a platform, but not really. I'm not entirely convinced that others capture more value from the Fruit Company ecosystem. Yes, for the AppStore they only get 30% of the value of third party sales, but they also sell the hardware and have their own extras. The Fruit Company is a platform company primarily by virtue of creating hardware, which generally makes one a platform, but other than that, they definitely look like they don't want to be a platform with the way they control everything, break stuff, etc.
AWS is for sure a platform.