Where did he go?

I have spent much of the weekend working on some browser-based tools to access S3 and manage content stored there. In talking to a few people about what I was working on, I often described it relative to a typical blog. Eventually that lead me to look at my own blog and realize that it has been over a year since I posted. Ouch.

So what have I been doing? Lots! Work (Amazon/S3) keeps me very busy. The last year has seen us continue to grow and launch feature after feature after feature. My team is hiring like crazy as well. This summer I spent 2 weeks in Maine with my family, trying to keep my nephew from riding off the roads into the bushes. I spent the spring climbing mountains taking the WAC's Basic Climbing Class. (Highly recommended by the way.) When not out hiking/climbing, my weekends are often occupied with walking/jogging the dog and generally enjoying Seattle.

I spent New Year's down in the SF Bay area visiting a friend, and talking to people down there made me realize how much I really love living in Seattle. It helps that so many of the tech people I talked to down there also use AWS. It is hard to imagine a better place to be.

Been a long time

I've been quite busy with work but unfortunately, the nature of what I do means that I can't really blog about it.  Or at least, I have yet to figure out how to appropriately blog about it.

That said... it is the most interesting job I have had since when we were first working on XML support in Internet Explorer 5. (Back then I was helping define the XML DOM, XPath, and tons of other amazing things that people take for granted now.)  Working on S3 has taught me more about the reality of building and running distributed systems, than I can even imagine fitting in one book.  Working on hard problems with a great team, makes this one of my favorite jobs of all time.  (p.s. we are hiring...)