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I just resigned from Amazon today, and reading this is giving my flashbacks to my earlier years there. When I first joined in 2013, it was incredibly difficult

by bilalq 5y ago

I just resigned from Amazon today, and reading this is giving my flashbacks to my earlier years there. When I first joined in 2013, it was incredibly difficult to leverage open source third party libraries and build systems like grunt/gulp. I ended up doing a lot of work to make it possible to model JS dependencies using the standard Amazon dependency management setup and to create bindings to our language/stack agnostic build system. It was an uphill battle at times, but I got things to a point where you could reasonably do things in Amazon similar to how you'd do them externally (without sacrificing any of the advantages of of our first party tools). The solutions I engineered still had to make some compromises and better solutions by dedicated teams were built later on, of course. All this just to say that I can very readily sympathize with the challenges that Googlers must be facing. Edit: To clarify, I put in my 2-week notice a while back and today was my last day. That's what I meant by "resigned today".

rattray 5y ago
Curious to hear more about the resignation?
- bilalq 5y ago
  Oh, hey Alex. As soon as I saw your handle, the name "Alex Rattray" popped to mind, and sure enough, that's who you are. I think I probably met you at a hackathon many years ago (maybe PennApps?), though it was probably in passing, since I don't think we ever worked together on a project. Small world though! I'd been at Amazon for many years and had always wanted to move on to doing my own startup, which is what I'll be doing starting tomorrow. It's an exciting moment for me. My biggest worry about leaving is figuring out what to do about health insurance, but my fallback plan is to go with COBRA until I figure something out.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    You should also checkout the health insurance exchange if in Washington. Those policies can be cost competitive to your COBRA costs, and resignation is an event that allows you grab one outside of open enrollment.
  - rattray 5y ago
    Hah! I had the exact same reaction. "Bilal Quadri!" Couldn't remember if you were famous or someone I knew. Let's catch up.
rejectedandsad 5y ago
It's several orders of magnitude easier with Brazil and the NPM Brazil wrappers at Amazon now, for the record.
- bilalq 5y ago
  Yeah, for sure. I was using them as early as this morning, haha. I've been through the whole end to end spectrum of this at Amazon, from wild-west every team doing their own custom things to building BrazilGrunt/BrazilGulp, and moving on to all the successors since then. Overcoming the incompatibility of npm's multi-version allowance and Brazil's need to have a single version of each package in the transitive closure of the dependency graph without hacks like shrinkwrapping was a key turning point.
- neves 5y ago
  Where can I find more about NPM Brazil?
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    You can’t, but in effect it’s kind of like a Node2nix https://github.com/svanderburg/node2nix#node2nix https://github.com/svanderburg/node2nix#node2nix

by bilalq 5y ago

rattray 5y ago

Curious to hear more about the resignation?

bilalq 5y ago
Oh, hey Alex. As soon as I saw your handle, the name "Alex Rattray" popped to mind, and sure enough, that's who you are. I think I probably met you at a hackathon many years ago (maybe PennApps?), though it was probably in passing, since I don't think we ever worked together on a project. Small world though! I'd been at Amazon for many years and had always wanted to move on to doing my own startup, which is what I'll be doing starting tomorrow. It's an exciting moment for me. My biggest worry about leaving is figuring out what to do about health insurance, but my fallback plan is to go with COBRA until I figure something out.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  You should also checkout the health insurance exchange if in Washington. Those policies can be cost competitive to your COBRA costs, and resignation is an event that allows you grab one outside of open enrollment.
- rattray 5y ago
  Hah! I had the exact same reaction. "Bilal Quadri!" Couldn't remember if you were famous or someone I knew. Let's catch up.

rejectedandsad 5y ago

It's several orders of magnitude easier with Brazil and the NPM Brazil wrappers at Amazon now, for the record.

bilalq 5y ago
Yeah, for sure. I was using them as early as this morning, haha. I've been through the whole end to end spectrum of this at Amazon, from wild-west every team doing their own custom things to building BrazilGrunt/BrazilGulp, and moving on to all the successors since then. Overcoming the incompatibility of npm's multi-version allowance and Brazil's need to have a single version of each package in the transitive closure of the dependency graph without hacks like shrinkwrapping was a key turning point.
neves 5y ago
Where can I find more about NPM Brazil?
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  You can’t, but in effect it’s kind of like a Node2nix https://github.com/svanderburg/node2nix#node2nix https://github.com/svanderburg/node2nix#node2nix