Stultitia Delenda Est

By now, my loyal readers should know that I’m a programmer for Amazon. Just over a month ago, I started on the Amazon Silk team. It’s a talented team of hard-working engineers at an amazing company. We’re a team that’s growing quickly, and we’re in desperate need of smart programmers. Here’s why you should apply to Amazon:

• Excellent compensation and benefits. I have to confess that I have something of a mercenary streak. So I won’t beat around the bush and just say that Amazon pays very, with compensation philosophy that fairly balances cash, stock, and bonus. One of the best aspects of this is that Amazon doesn’t give you stock options. They give you actual stock. I’m basically of the opinion that stock options are an amateur-hour scam, and so I’m happy that when my Amazon stock vests, it’s mine.
• An unbeatable corporate culture. Many corporations have “Corporate Virtues” or similar. Handy sappy phrases they put in press releases more for PR impact than to act as guiding principles. Amazon is the only company at which I’ve worked where those principles are taken seriously. Amazon has an amazingly customer-centric culture that values ownership and inventiveness and rewards accomplishment.
• A career path for engineers. Many tech companies has two positions for programmers: Programmer and Senior Programmer. The difference being that the senior programmer threatened to leave at one point. Amazon, on the other hand, is a company that’s been built almost entirely engineers. It’s a company that understand that programmers are craftsmen and they have unique interests, talents, and areas of specialties. They also understand that programmers don’t stop growing at the mythical 5-year mark. So at Amazon, there’s a complete engineering path, going from introductory level SDE I positions all the way up through Distinguished Engineers. Each level is well-defined, without being constraining. The company encourages you to develop your skills and improve your craft, and they reward that improvement with increased responsibility and freedom.
• Nerf Wars Several of the guys in this video are on Silk now. Work with some of the best Nerf Marksmen in the software industry.
• Complete mobility. Amazon understands that programmers have diverse interests and tend to appreciate novelty and interesting new problems. Which is why Amazon encourages people to switch teams and job roles on a regular basis. Many programmers switch teams every year or so. I only spent thirteen months on my initial team, and when the chance came to apply to join the Silk team, it was as easy as letting my manager know. Even international transfers are available, as Amazon has developers all across North America, Europe, and Asia.
• Be the worst person in the band. Pat Metheny, the legendary jazz guitarist, once said that the secret to his success was that he always made sure he was the worst guy in every band he was in. That goes for any art and any craft, programming not excepted. I often feel like I’m the worst guy in the band. I can tell you honestly and without hyperbole that I work with some of the smartest programmers in the world. I’ve learned more in fifteen months at Amazon than I learned in four years of college and four years of diverse industry experience. There’s no better place to learn and sharpen your craft, and to get to know some of the brightest technical minds in the world.
• Kegerator. Amazon’s official motto is “Work hard. Have fun. Make History.” They definitely take all three parts of it seriously. And part of having fun is things like having a Kegerator in kitchen.
• No, seriously — Make History. Amazon solves problems that no one else in the world has solved. There aren’t many places in the tech industry where you can do that. On the Silk team, we’re rewriting what it means to have a browser in the era of cloud computing. We’ve had great success so far, but we’re only just getting started. We’re going to make history and we want smart, hard-working engineers to help us do that.

So that’s the hard sell. If you want to learn more feel free to drop me a line in the comments or shoot me an email. If you want to apply, you can email me your resume at aabrown@amazon.com.

Disclosure Notice

Robert Zubrin is one of the most important advocates for space flight we have. His book The Case for Mars is one of the single best pieces of space-related writing I’ve found, and it makes an extremely convincing case for putting human boots on Mars. Moreover, it lays out an excellent sketch of how we might accomplish exactly that. It’s well worth your time and attention.

So I was happy to see Mr. Zubrin has written an excellent article for the next issue of Reason magazine on the topic of space flight safety. It’s available to read online. An excerpt:

Keeping astronauts safe merits significant expenditure. But how much? There is a potentially unlimited set of testing procedures, precursor missions, technological improvements, and other protective measures that could be implemented before allowing human beings to once again try flying to other worlds. Were we to adopt all of them, we would wind up with a human spaceflight program of infinite cost and zero accomplishment. In recent years, the trend has moved in precisely that direction, with NASA’s manned spaceflight effort spending more and more to accomplish less and less. If we are to achieve anything going forward, we have to find some way to strike a balance between human life and mission accomplishment.

Disclosure Notice

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From the always-excellent, oft-disturbing Cyanide & Happiness.

…the world ends in ice. Or so you’d think, judging from the news coverage around these parts. Governor Gregoire has declared a state of emergency and 200,000 people east of Lake Washington are without power.

Despite the dire coverage, the situation here in the city is pretty tame. The roads are slushy but passable, and I’ve only seen one bus run into the ditch which is a better record than last year. The routes into downtown are in fair condition and unless you want to get up the steeper parts of Queen Anne, you’re probably fine getting anywhere you need to go.

Being in the tech industry, most of my team’s been working from home the past few days. Which works pretty well, except that a few of them live smack dab in the middle of the area that lost power.

This storm, as so many things do, gave me a chance to reflect on how awesome it is living in the future. Thanks to the Internet I can work from home, get my groceries delivered, order pizza, get realtime updates and forecasts. The Internet can connect me to anything I need to weather this storm, no matter how long it lasts.

Unless, of course, the power goes out.

So here’s hoping the power outage doesn’t spread, and best wishes to anyone caught in it. I hope you’re well-provisioned and in good company.

As for me, I have food, video games, warmth, and excellent companionship. Not a bad way to spend the apocalypse.

I love big cities to an almost embarrassing extent. In so far as I have a religion, it takes the form of an ecstatic disposition towards my own trinity of music, technology, and urban environments. This little time lapse montage of Moscow set to a killer soundtrack is a nice little two minute sermon to that religion.

Москва’2011(Moscow/Russia) from zweizwei |motion timelapse| on Vimeo.

Found via Radley Balko over at The Agitator.

Attention Conservation Notice: Regular readers can skip this post without missing anything of importance.

Solution: I fixed this issue by opening the properties for the network and selecting “do not automatically connect to this network”, then disconnecting, reconnecting, and reauthenticating.

Details: I’m visiting my folks for the weekend, and their ISP here in the Tri-Cities is a little flaky. Earlier today the Internet service cut out and, not needing my machine at the moment, I just put it to sleep.

On resuming the machine, I couldn’t connect to their network. I confirmed that the network and internet were working fine on another machine.

Restarting router and modem did nothing. Restarting the machine did nothing. Restarting just the wireless LAN adapter did nothing. Windows’ Network Troubleshooting Wizard was its typical useless self. I tried reauthenticating to the network and messing with the network settings. Nothing worked.

On a lark I went into the list of visible wireless networks, right click on the appropriate network, selected properties and disabled the checkbox that says “Connect automatically when this network is in range.” I then reconnected to the network, it prompted me for credentials. When I reauthenticated, it worked fine.

I then re-enabled auto-connect and the network continued to work fine.

Seems that flaky Internet plus system suspend somehow equaled corrupted cached credentials or something. At any rate, the secret sauce for me was disabling auto-connect on that network.

Hope this helps.

Communism will go down as one of the great evils of the 20th century. Here’s hoping that the last communist regimes in the world collapse soon enough that its toxic impact on the 21st century can be minimized.

Kim Jong Il’s death will hopefully offer us a small step in that direction. His unique “juche” take on the twist Communist world view lead to the death (through starvation and execution) and imprisonment of millions of people. But North Korea and its people are still laboring under the horrors of a communist state. Kim Jong Il’s death is happy news, but it doesn’t end the terror that reigns in Northern half of the Korean peninsula.

A less happy death also occurred recently. Vaclav Havel, a great defender of liberty, also recently died. In this video he reminds us not only that there are still Communist and tyrannical states in the world, including one in our own backyard, but that there are still dissidents working to foster liberty and justice in those places. These dissidents deserve our admiration and support.

My favorite band of Cuban “dissidents”, Porno Para Ricardo:

Related: the lead singer, Gorki Aguila, spent time in a Cuban prison on charges of “Social Dangerousness”. I submit that this is the single most Punk Rock accomplishment a dissident can have.