Does anyone know who else was involved in constructing this memo?
"There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever"
Was Bezos deeply enough involved in Amazon's engineering to set those rules himself, or was the text of the memo influenced by a senior engineering group that he was working with?
The "text of the memo" is really just the article's author not understanding the context of Steve Yegge's years-later retelling, from which that text comes. "His Big Mandate went something along these lines" (Yegge's words right before the quoted text) doesn't even imply there was a singular 'memo' involved, and definitely (and obviously) wasn't meant to say that the text was actually what Bezos wrote. So the footnote "Whether or not it existed in this exact form" is unnecessarily ambiguous about whether these were Bezos' words. They're clearly not - besides Yegge not saying they are, they're a dead ringer for Yegge's style and not at all Bezos'.
Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.
and then the next line clarifies that only the last part of the whole story was a joke:
> #6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell.
Not to be too critical, but this blog post is a (in my opinion, poor) rehash of Steve Yegge's infamous Google+ post which he accidentally posted online. It's entertaining and one of the most influential memos I've read in the last twenty years.
And the cargo-culting of "everything should be API no exception" was due to Yegge's colorful writing which endorsed it (relative to how things were done at Google at the time he was there) in his original piece. I sometime wonder if this development philosophy drove the microtizing of services, and then AWS went to sell that philosophy all over the world. There is such a thing as TOO MUCH atomizing of services.
Many people may not know this but Jeff Bezos clearly has a technical background as evidenced by this blurb from his Wikipedia entry:
“graduated from Princeton University in 1986. He holds a degree in electrical engineering and computer science”.
Of course he’s more known for his decision-making ability as an executive but he clearly has a solid understanding of computing fundamentals as his memo on Amazon S3 characterized it as “malloc for the Internet” [0][1].
This was less about a memo showing up one day out of the blue and more like an attempt to bring resolution to a series of long, heated, and not terribly productive debates that took raged through the development teams over many months. It's worth knowing that the "before" state was that almost every team exposed their functionality via bespoke C/C++ libraries that everybody else linked to, and this resulted in enormous (for the time) spaghetti binaries. Want to write a little script that needs one piece of information from the database with customer information in it? No problem, just link the customer team's client library, and its 100MB of direct dependencies and 800MB of indirect dependencies. A handful of teams (notably those that already had to interface with third parties) were trying a different way (like http services written in Java) but they got a lot of side eye (or even more direct "you're doing it wrong" remarks) from the "core" developers.
My favorite is the control theory anecdote (point 2 here: https://gigaom.com/2013/10/10/5-fun-and-terrifying-facts-abo... ). Some people are just able to grasp the core of a large number of topics really fast, and born-in-1964-Jeffrey seems to be one of them. It’s fairly clear he would be very well versed at various tech architectural designs even if he didn’t have a CS background, I’ve worked with several people (ostensibly not at that level) and it’s some of the most fun times ever. They’re not burdened by any traditions and are often able to make breakthroughs in ideas that people steeped in the field are unable to themselves.
"There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever"
Was Bezos deeply enough involved in Amazon's engineering to set those rules himself, or was the text of the memo influenced by a senior engineering group that he was working with?