DVassallo

Oops. Typo. I meant IaC.

The email receipt should have a download link. If you didn't get the receipt, email me and I'll resend it to you.

Almost all on Twitter. (But got some sales from this too now :))

I've been active on Twitter for the last 10 months, since I left my job. I've been documenting what I'm doing and my professional story as it happens. Gradually built a following of 13K, and they helped me spread the word when I launched this.

Yes, definitely. The first part is very high level. It’s our opinionated perspective of the most important AWS products and how we think about them (which is not exactly how Amazon describes them). The second part is more technical and focused on developers who want to set up an AWS environment and understand what’s going on.

And if what you find doesn't match what you're expecting, just reply to the email and you'll get a full refund – no questions asked.

I assume you just read the ToC, not the chapter? In the book we recommend using an IoC tool, and that CloudFormation is good enough. We don't think that CloudFormation vs Terraform is a very consequential decision, so choose whichever tool you prefer. But we also share our perspective about what should go in IoC and what shouldn't, which is a much more important issue IMO.

Mostly an experiment. I wanted to get a concrete idea about whether it's possible to make a living producing digital products like these (and whether I could do it :)). I don't have that answer yet (too early), but now I have some evidence that something like this can sell.

Started in October, spending about 1 day a week. Then we did a big push over the last 10 days.

Hey. I’m one of the authors. We focused on things we have significant first-hand experience with. We didn’t want to write on things which we haven’t used ourselves for many years.

It was 180K cash and the rest in Oracle stock vesting every 3 months.

Yes, started sde-1 in 2010 and had been sde-3 since 2014

I had a competing offer from Oracle in 2016 at $370K, and Amazon matched it to $390K for 2016 to 2018. An extra $70K and $120K in 2017 and 2018 came from stock growth. But for 2019 and 2020 they had topped me up to ~$460K, so I would have kept that level if I stayed, even with no stock growth.

I’m sure they are differences, but I doubt any high-paying big tech job is going to be low-stress. I don’t mean necessarily working long hours, but you get the kind of work where you need to be figuring out ambiguous problems, always convincing other stakeholders, dealing with some level of drama, etc. Things that require expending a lot of energy.

It’s unlikely you’d be just converting Jira tasks to code at these levels. (That would be my definition of a low-stress job).

Not the OP, but here's my own compensation growth at Amazon from 2010 to 2018 as an independent contributor (started SDE-1, left as an SDE-3): https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1164778970778259458

I left Amazon 9 months ago, after working there for 8.5 years. My total comp was over $500K when I left, which made it both easy (allowed me to save money) and hard to leave (I left about $1M of granted RSUs+Salary for 2019-2020 on the table).

At one point, I realized that a career as a full-time employee in at a "high-stress" employer is not the ideal one for me. I'm working for myself right now, but if one day I needed to go get a full-time job again, I would almost certainly not go to big tech again. I'd rather get paid a fifth of what I was doing, but do something that leaves me with some energy after I put in a day's work. My compensation and status growth were not conducive to increased satisfaction. I wrote more about my reasoning here: https://medium.com/@dvassallo/only-intrinsic-motivation-last...

SEEKING WORK | Seattle, USA | REMOTE ONLY

Anything AWS. I worked at AWS for 8 years (Nov 2010 - Feb 2019) and I know the important AWS services inside out. I can help set up AWS infra, audit an existing AWS setup, give guidance on AWS services, help with IAM configuration, set up CI/CD, etc.

$300/hour. 10 hours available each month.

Email me: daniel@encrypted.dev

This seems to be genuine: https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/1182353727329488896?s=21

> We quickly learned that everything in AWS has some kind of service limit

Except S3. Unlimited objects, and unlimited Put and Get requests.

Interesting. My email was from 2.5 months ago, so maybe this changed recently.

I have more than that as runway. I just don't want it to be in my LLC's checking account.

Which is fine. Brex has no obligation to underwrite me. But I got an Amex and Chase business credit card in 15 minutes with cash back bonuses that match Brex's. Yes, I'm personally liable to the balance, but I'm not accumulating any anyway. I auto-pay the balance every month.

FYI, for Brex, the definition of "a startup" is a company with $500K cash in its checking account: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1179520756905955328

K8 grandmaster?

If you can run your app on your laptop, you can run it on EC2.

The original study is here: https://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/fine...

Yes, here in Seattle the cheapest plan on the Obamacare market is $14K/year with a $15K deductible for a family. However low income families can qualify for subsidies.

It's a company-wide issue, and it can be observed from the outside too. Existing products improve at a rate that is significantly slower than competitors (with a few exceptions). And I'm not referring to feature creep, but fixing obvious gaps and issues that the company would have been aware of for years (or more than a decade in some cases).

Don’t take it too literally. My point was that AWS doesn’t show agility and rapid innovation on existing products, so when it tries to tell you how to do that, maybe take it with a grain of salt.

That attitude is what leads to the AWS console.

AWS is great at horizontal innovation (launching a lot of brand new stuff). It's vertical innovation where they struggle (improving existing products). Software architecture helps the latter much more than the former.

Agility is not about deployment speed. It's about being able to react quickly and easily to new information (customer complaints, bugs, new opportunities, etc). You don't need a perspective from the inside to make the claim that AWS's evolution rate of existing products is weak. Innovation speed might be high horizontally (launching a ton of new services), but not vertically (improving existing ones).

Changing a button was just one example. How about this? https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1166700686467166208

> To succeed in using application development to increase agility and innovation speed, organizations must adopt five elements, in any order: microservices; purpose-built databases; automated software release pipelines; a serverless operational model; and automated, continuous security.

When I worked at AWS, it used to take us months to change the position of a button in the UI. Things that our competitors did in hours and days, we did in months and years.

I'd say that as a general heuristic, if you want "to increase agility and innovation speed" do the opposite of what Amazon does.