Been A While

It has been a while since my last post. An incredible year filled with ups and downs, but mostly ups.

Amazon ended up not being the dream employer I had imagined. I found the work challenging and engaging, but massive layoff rounds combined with threats to return to a physical office which would require relocation really made it hard to square with their mantra of “World’s Greatest Employer®”.

During the chaos a new opportunity arose at Mozilla. I took a position as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer overseeing the Apple infrastructure used for Firefox CI and performance testing.

I was somewhat reluctant to get back into the MacAdmin space but I soon discovered it would be unlike any role I had previously. I am enjoying seeing how the software “sausage” is made and am proud of my contributions to the team thus far.

On a personal note, my wife and I brought our second daughter into the world in February. It’s no exaggeration when I say that I feel as if I am the most blessed person on the planet.

Day 1

Today was my first day at AWS. I can honestly say I am equal parts excited and terrified. I am on a great team and my leadership has a vision for my upward career trajectory.

I figure by the time I start getting comfortable baby number two will have arrived. I continue to feel incredibly blessed.

Grand Opening. Grand Closing.

It was a solid seven weeks at Amazon Care. Landed what seemed to be my dream job, fell in love with my team and the leadership…but alas, Amazon Care will be no more at the end of the year.

The good news is that there seems to be a high amount of internal opportunities open and teams at Amazon are actively helping re-place us.

I am confident something will work out but the next few months will no doubt be chaotic as the interviewing process ramps up again.

Four Weeks In

This week marks my fourth week at Amazon Care. I am on an incredibly great team of Systems Engineers. I try to keep my enthusiasm measured when around them but it’s so nice not being a one person show.

I’ve also found most of the onboarding training to be deeply thoughtful and not as “canned” as I’m used to. Might be the new job feel but I can’t help but feeling this was the right move.

I’ve also been highly enjoying Jeff Sutherland’s book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time. As someone fairly new (~1 year) to Scrum, I welcome the iterative nature of improvement and constant/consistent accountability.