If you like Song Exploder, a friend of mine and I started a music production podcast where we dissect one song each week that you might also like: http://songaweek.net/
I sit next to the team that built this, and work with them nearly every day. They are every bit as awesome as the dropdown would suggest, and you should definitely email Chad about working with them if you are interested in projects like this.
Having done this sort of thing both ways, it's clear to me that there is much value in getting the consensus and energy of teammates and potential clients behind your project before it gets too far along.
When designing a prototype service / API, it's really easy to miss important use cases and failure modes that may be obvious to a fresh set of eyes, and get lost in the fun of creating it. Once this code goes to production, it's always harder to go back and fix these deficiencies, especially if a large number of clients come to depend on the API in its prototype form.
It's better to scrap and rewrite the prototype with multiple people involved, as it will save time, pain, and churn in the long run.
I worked with a guy a couple years ago who used the planets and nearby stars as a version numbering scheme. For example, the first revision of a file might be "Jupiter" and the second revision might have been called "Mars." (Of course, he didn't use the planets in their natural order)
He also refused to use real version control or even any kind of on network backup and insisted on using a Zip drive to back up all of the code he was working on. Needless to say, we had an intervention that involved hiding the Zip drive, and he quit in disgust shortly after.
Completely agree. The AWS team is one of the very few examples of rapid iteration and improvement from a big company.
I'm as interested in the AWS team as I am in any startup that exists today. I'd love to read about the tech challenges/team make up, etc. Is there any good coverage of this?
Yes, would definitely be interesting to find out how they maintain the quality and release so often. Would be a good data point to see if they use any of the agile processes and any tweaks they have done to make it work for them.
If Bezos's personality is decidedly noncorporate, so are some of his ideas about how to run a large organization. One of Bezos's more memorable behind-the-scenes moments came during an off-site retreat, says Risher. "People were saying that groups needed to communicate more. Jeff got up and said, 'No, communication is terrible!' " The pronouncement shocked his managers. But Bezos pursued his idea of a decentralized, disentangled company where small groups can innovate and test their visions independently of everyone else. He came up with the notion of the "two-pizza team": If you can't feed a team with two pizzas, it's too large. That limits a task force to five to seven people, depending on their appetites.
I first tried Rackspace Cloud, who would send me frequent marketing-style e-mails with stock photos of intelligent-looking office employees, ask me to participate in raffles, and other nonsense that I would quickly filter.
I much prefer seeing new feature announcements from AWS in my inbox! (And on HN.)
I use AWS both for work and for personal (love the free tier micro to play around with on my own time) and I am always impressed with how polished new features feel.
