Friday, February 14th is my last day at Amazon. I’ve been at Amazon for over 5½ half years, and it’s been a great run. I came from 8 years of leading technology at Artsy, and wanted to go back to coding. I found a Principal Engineer role to help launch the new AWS Data Exchange service. I was excite...

Should you work on week-ends? tl;dr Only 2% of my paid work was accomplished on weekends, which matches my opinion that you should not. Collecting Data First, let’s try to use data and find out whether I actually work on week-ends. I’ve contributed to the open-source OpenSearch since 2021 as part of...

Most paying customers expect a certain level of (paid) support. One opens a ticket, gets a response, and any issue can be resolved. How does “support” work in open-source? My rule of thumb is to meet users where they are. GitHub projects have issues, but opening an issue to ask a question is general...

I found it annoyingly non-trivial to add a spell checker to this blog. For now, I settled on GitHub Spellcheck Action that uses PySpelling on files changed in the commit or pull request as described in this blog post. name: Check Spelling on: [push, pull_request] jobs: check: runs-on: ubuntu-latest ...

Since my first day in AWS 5 1/2 years ago, I’ve been experimenting with keeping a CHANGELOG of everything I do, available for everyone at the company to see. I wrote about it here. If you work at AWS, use the URL in the screenshot below to find it. I wrote a little script to try and classify where I...

Have you watched The IT Crowd? It’s a hilarious British television sitcom from around 2006 that cast a bunch of IT geniuses at the Reynholm Industries tech support department in London. One of the signature laughs is that every time the phone rang, Roy would pick it up and without waiting say “Have ...