What It Was like to Be Amazon’s 5th Software Engineer | Eric Benson

Invent like an Owner with Dave Schappell

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3y ago 1:08:14

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Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Eric Benson to discuss his myriad early software engineering projects at a time when Amazon was rapidly growing as a company. He implemented Book Matcher (which didn’t last long) and the Similarities feature, and later built the original version of Weblabs that helped test which Amazon features were optimal. Eric also mentored many of the new software engineers, and later worked to port Amazon from Digital Unix to Linux (along with Bob Vadnais, and others).

Eric Benson joined Amazon in 1996 as the 5th software engineer. He is currently a Software Consultant at United States Digital Service (USDS), a government agency composed of a group of technologists from diverse backgrounds working across the federal government to transform critical services for the people.

Episode Resources:

Eric Benson’s LinkedIn and Twitter
Find Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter

What to Listen For:

00:00 Intro
02:39 Amazon's multi-day outage in 1997
05:15 Back then there was no backup server, just one customer database
07:09 Joining Amazon in 1996
10:00 Improving the website software was one of the first tasks
12:52 Book Matcher: people get recommendations after posting a rating
15:36 Developing the Similarities feature
24:10 Instant Recommendations
25:31 Promoting unusual items to show up in recommendations
27:00 Building v1 of Weblabs
34:16 People get burned out when there’s too much information
37:34 CatSubst is putting marks in the HTML file to notify the software it serves
39:44 Experimenting between showing 3 and 5 similar items
41:09 Is every new feature slowing down the site?
42:54 The biggest problem with CatSubst
45:11 The hardware cost per unit was very high
49:21 Hardships of the engineering team while using Linux
53:27 Rufus the Dog and several site launches
57:26 Helping new engineers with language and coding
01:01:13 Software engineering at Amazon was too advanced for packaged software solutions from 3rd parties
01:04:05 From a small business to becoming a huge company

15 episod

#Careers #Entrepreneur #Business #Dave Schappell #Amazon #History #Innovation #Inventions