What programmers like

Quote of the day, found on the High Scalability blog while looking into Amazon's SimpleDB

"Programmers like problems they can solve with more programming."

Of Liquidity, Competition and Platforms

This post by Bob Wyman "Of Liquidity, Competition and Platforms" reminds me why I subscribe to tech blogs - occasionally you get a deep thinker that clearly and concisely describes something that likely took them a long time to figure out.

"As many others have said, much of what people are building today is 'features' not products. As long as that is the case, raw economics is the real problem with the software business. Competition strengthens the platform builders while eviscerating the component builders... The rich get richer and the builders of innovative features must be satisfied with the 'personal rewards' of doing a job well unless they get lucky in the buy-out lottery game."

With the various cloud computing efforts well underway, and with each providing a different approach as a 'platform', it would be good for developers and entrepreneurs to think about which road to travel.

Amazon Payment System

I was looking at the Amazon Flexible Payment System service API and it's a whopping big set of docs. Unfortunately, I was sorely disappointed to see the operations in the HTTP based API (called a REST Request) seem to all be GET requests with an Action= query term. Ugh.
The documentation doesn't even mention what HTTP method to use, what content-type to submit or expect as a return, etc. I'm pretty sure that they simply don't know the difference. Sad but true. At least there are docs.

I suppose they didn't have the time to make it simple.

Out of Amazon

Today is my last day as an official Amazon employee. I've been on leave of absence for three months and have decided not to return at this time.

This was not an easy decision - recently I was talking with a team at Amazon about a project they have started and it's exactly the kind of thing I've been wanting to build for years - but there are some other things I'd like to work on elsewhere.

I think Amazon is great, they have smart people and are in a great position to grow the Web. I expect to continue to see great things launched by the people at Amazon and really, really look forward to the project my friends are building.

Thanks for everything!

Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots

Ah, the good old days of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. When I was a kid this was a favorite game and it looks like Mattel has a new re-issue of the game.

The interesting thing about this particular page on Amazon is that this game is offered by three separate sellers, and Amazon is one of them. Before today, this was not possible due to the exclusivity contract Amazon was operating under. My team was only peripherally involved with the effort to make this happen, but watching the speed and professionalism of all the teams drilling into all the details, crossing the T's and dotting the I's, really made me proud. Not only did the people here work quickly and competently, but the software platform worked as designed.

Another interesting thing about that page, the customer reviews have multiple categories of stars - durability, fun, educational and overall - I never noticed that. Those are exactly the areas I look into when reviewing toys and games. Pretty cool.

Let the Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots competition begin.

S3 support Virtual Hosting

This is good news - S3 supports the Host header in HTTP requests. I had been meaning to write about the security holes is storing different people's data within the same domain - as soon as two people host javascript, then 'cross site scripting' becomes possible within one host domain. This enhancement allows folks to trivially avoid that problem (assuming people want to host HTML and Javascript on S3 - not it's advertised purpose).

ACM Interview with Werner Vogels

I finally found time to read the ACM interview with Werner Vogels about Amazon and service oriented architecture (conducted by Jim Grey, no less). He talks a bit about Amazon history and a bit about how services affect development teams as well as the runtime and operational benefits.

Here's one of several 'lessons learned' that Werner recounts:

A second lesson is probably that by prohibiting direct database access by clients, you can make scaling and reliability improvements to your service state without involving your clients.

Interesting - since a database is also a service, what is the essential difference between direct 'database' access and direct 'service' access that improves the situation?

Another interesting comment:

Other lessons are related to how you access services: If you want to be able to aggregate services easily, if you want to insert advanced infrastructure techniques such as decentralized request routing or distributed request tracking, you need a single unified service-access mechanism.

Hmmm, the single unified access mechanism sounds like a protocol. I'm in the middle of building a new service and haven't been considering this - I wonder if I'm going to get in trouble. But I guess that's okay, since my business card does say Sr. Troublemaker...


Now this is the part that I like - as it involves my stuff!

About a million small and larger businesses sell on the Amazon platform. For example, if you go to one of the book pages, you will find that item is also available new or used from some of our many partners. These can be very small independent bookshops or larger retail operators that want to sell on our platform.

And onto REST...

Do we see that customers who develop applications using AWS care about REST or SOAP? Absolutely not! A small group of REST evangelists continue to use the Amazon Web Services numbers to drive that distinction, but we find that developers really just want to build their applications using the easiest toolkit they can find. They are not interested in what goes on the wire or how request URLs get constructed; they just want to build their applications.

Naked Answers

I like what Werner wrote about the visit from Shel Israel and Robert Scoble. Heh, wish I'd been there. I must have missed the email...

Anyway, this particular part struck me as being very true :

Amazon is a long time pioneer in the space of involving their customers with our product. And we really listen to our customers; any Amazon employee who encounters an issue on a forum or weblog or at any other place is empowered to escalate those issues internally immediately until they get fixed. Customer feedback is essential for Amazon and we will use all effective means to get it.

A few times over the past few years I've brought issues to internal teams and each time they have been totally positive about working on them - often it's a 'user education' thing (usually I'm the one being educated), but when it's a larger issue I've seen teams honestly re-examine what they are doing and incorporate the feedback and real change really happens.

Irish pub on St Patrick's Day

On most Friday's, our team goes out for a lunch in Seattle's International district - mostly Asian, Thai and Indian food. But this Friday as we were heading out, we remembered it was St Patrick's Day and started looking for an Irish pub. The ones we knew about were kind of far, so we decided on going to F.X. McRory's - I always thought of it as a whiskey bar, but figured it had some Irish-ness to it.
When we got there, the staff all had some sort of green hat or shamrock painted on their cheek, so we knew we found the right place. There is a huge dining hall off to one side with high ceilings, old wooden floors and super tall windows letting in the sun - it was very nice. But the best part was that our table was right next to a band playing drums and bagpipes! I love the sound of bagpipes, but dang they were loud . We noticed later that the musicians had ear plugs - cheaters.
The menu had stew, shepherd's pie and corned beef and cabbage sandwiches - so I got the sandwich. I'd never had corned beef before and I have to say it's good enough try again someday - especially given a tall glass of Guiness to go along with it. But I'll have to warn you, the little dish of what looks like cabbage isn't cabbage, so if you take a big bite (like I did) you'd better really like horseradish.

Amazon S3 - finally, a real REST service

The new S3 Web service has what I would consider a very well designed REST interface that is also well documented (all the Amazon Web services have decent documentation). The current set of Amazon Web services is starting to grow nicely.

The S3 service is advertised as a Web-scale storage system with a super simple API and apparently very low storage and bandwidth costs. Each resource stored can be up to 5GB and also has support for ACL based permissions - to access the ACL, just append "?acl" to the resource. That's pretty simple and effective.

Amazon turns 10

Amazon is 10 years old this week - and two great musicians (Bob Dylan and Norah Jones) are going to give a show! But I'm going to be out of the country :(

This NYT article an Amazon is amusing - the 'analysts' still want Bezos to quit:

"But in general, the practice in the technology world is to bring in an experienced manager who can earn Wall Street's respect, either shortly after the founding of a company or just before it goes public."

This is kind of funny advice, since there is no other place that has the experience that Amazon needs to run the business. And Amazon historically has worked to earn the respect of customers - I think Wall Street should go earn their own respect. Also, the practice of bringing in new management - in general - also has happened just before a company vaporizes. Coincidence? I think not.

Not: Ecommerce sites use personal info to charge you more

This is a somewhat misleading snippet claiming that
Ecommerce sites use personal info to charge you more. I don't know about other sites but I'm pretty sure Amazon has no such pricing capability. I'm an engineering manager responsible for the software services that manage all offers and prices at Amazon. Often products have multiple sellers each offering the item at different prices - these show up in the 'buy box' and the featured offer is rotated periodically. This might explain why a price changed. Also, sellers change their prices all the time. Also, one seller can go out of stock, and the next seller's offer would be featured and their price would be used. Many things can cause the price of a product to change.

Whatever happened to investigative journalism?

Amazon directory of free MP3 downloads

Via BoingBoing - there's a directory of free MP3 downloads on Amazon. Finding the underlying URI for the actual MP3 is a bit of a challenge though.

I had put up a playlist on Webjay for some of these a while back - but it's nice to access the full list.

Amazon Zuggest

Oh, gawd. Somebody built a nice example of a live browser based search against Amazon's catalog. If this takes off, it might even add a bit more load on the servers.

The app is neat, but search results aren't different by letter, so maybe searching on whole words instead would be better. And use fixed width tables so things don't jump about so much.

Amazon.com: Yellow Pages: Pacmed Cafe

So that's what those folks were doing the whole time... Interesting.

Here's a shot of the Amazon castle on the hill. Sometimes I go up there for a cheeseburger.
Amazon.com: Yellow Pages: Pacmed Cafe

I tried getting the URI for Amazon HQ, but it resolved to the sample center down on Rainier Avenue - not nearly as picturesque as the PacMed building.

Coolio - here's the coffee shop I walk to from work. I wonder if I could reference an individual image from the block shots they have. Using just the ASIN, I'm at the mercy of the community voting on the 'best' image. I'd like to piggyback on the data and have a direct URI to that block shot.

Amazon sets new record over Thanksgiving weekend

From itfacts.biz

Internet's largest retailer Amazon.com said that for the first time sales of electronics surpassed the sales of books on its Web site. During that weekend 2.8 mln units were ordered within a single day, or 1 item was sold every 32 seconds. During the busiest hour, Amazon received 700,000 unique visitors to the site.

I think they did the math wrong - 2.8M per day is 32 items ordered per second. That's a lot of orders. (The link to the news story has it right.)

metaAmazon

My good friend Adam (name dropping in the blogosphere - how cool is that?) has an interesting piece on the vision of personal commerce, the 'long tail of ecommerce' and Amazon:

Amazon already takes me part of the way there today: by being an affiliate I can recommend books and music and get a cut of anything that Amazon the merchant sells through my referrals. But taken to the extreme, what if Amazon ceased to be a merchant and instead enabled me to be the merchant using their infrastructure? The benefit to me is that I can choose only "Rifkin-recommended" products, pricing, policies, catablogs, etc. -- and not just me.

Every person could become an Amazon.

Krzysztof Kowalczyk weblog

From the weblog of Krzysztof Kowalczyk:

Mike, who works for Amazon, defends Amazon but I don't like his spin. First, he denigrates the value of the source code and elevates the value of Amazon's web services and data they provide.

Well, I'm very sorry if what I wrote sounded like a negative judgement of the value of software itself, I just believe that the source code that we work with really wouldn't be of any value to an outside party. This is not true of all software in general, just the work that my group at Amazon does to collect and unify product information across all sellers. I think the software written at Amazon is well done, professional and very educational (to me anyway). However, when I imagine handing over this software based system to some other organization, I really don't see that it would be successful. The value come from large volumes of data. Perhaps some mundane aspects like hooking into CORBA portable object adapters for performance profiling and logging purposes might be of benefit - but who in the open source community really is using CORBA? It's too standardized and stable to attract the run of the mill coding cowboy nowadays anyway. (okay, that was a little flamebait, but it's New Years, why not have a little fun?)

How does Amazon contribute back to OSS?

Hmm, maybe I shouldn't jump in here, but Krzysztof Kowalczyk doesn't like some aspect of Amazon and I'd like to correct that - either through pointing out what we do or through changing what we do.

I'm picking on Google, but they are not alone. Amazon, yahoo, ebay, aol. Any large business that uses web as means of providing services and making revenues is enjoying enormous savings by using open source stack on their back end. And what do they contribute back? A good approximation of zero compared to benefits they reap.

So, what does Amazon contribute back? There might not be much in terms of mere lines of code - dead software that doesn't do anything for you - but in terms of real data and a living, growing and scalable service it's huge. Amazon is host to 50M products and makes these available via Web Services - simple HTTP and XML. No amount of source code distribution would enable third-party developers to equal this feat. There's no real magic here in the software (complex and customized as it is), the value comes from the actual data and the actual 24x7 support of the service. We could describe the algorithms used to create product authority, but without 10s of millions of products the algorithm is useless. In this business, content is king.

Amazon and American Red Cross Tsunami Disaster Relief

Please visit this link at Amazon and donote to the American Red Cross for disaster relief.
So far - $250K in 1 hour.

American Red Cross