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Leaving Amazon

So, after just over 3 and a half years, I’m leaving Amazon.

It’s been great fun — I can honestly say, even with my code being used by hundreds of millions of users in SpamAssassin and elsewhere, I hadn’t really had to come to grips with the distributed systems problems that an Amazon-scale service involves.

During my time at Amazon, I’ve had the pleasure of building out a brand-new, groundbreaking innovative internal service, from scratch to its current status where it’s deployed in production datacenters worldwide. It’s a low-latency service, used to monitor Amazon’s internal networks using massive quantities of measurement data and machine learning algorithms. It’s really very nifty, and I’m quite proud of what we’ve achieved. I was lucky to work closely with some very smart people during this, too — Amazon has some top-notch engineers.

But time to move on! In a week’s time, I’ll be joining Swrve to work on the server-side architecture of their system. Swrve have a very interesting product, extending the A/B-testing model into gaming, and a great team; and it’ll be nice to get back into startup-land once again, for a welcome change. (It’s not all roses working for a big company. ;) I’m looking forward to it. Who knows, I may even start blogging here again…

Pity about losing those 12 phone tool icons though!