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| <h4 id="planning-center---lead-developer">Planning Center - Lead Developer</h4> | ||
| <p>Most recently, I’ve built several products for Planning Center. The base of operations is in San Diego, but there are a bunch of us spread all over the place (I’m in sunny Seattle, WA). A fantastic group of people.</p> | ||
| <h4 id="the-city---foundercto">The City - Founder/CTO</h4> | ||
| <p>Back in 2008, I founded and built a social network for churches called The City. It was acquired by Zondervan, a subsidiary of Harper Collins, a subsidiary of News Corporation. I think it had nearly a million users by the end there.</p> | ||
| <h4 id="amazoncom---infrastructure--software-sr-manager">Amazon.com - Infrastructure & Software Sr. Manager</h4> | ||
| <p>I did some really neat stuff at Amazon.com: competitive pricing, sales anomaly detection…stuff we would describe today as data science-like things. I’m quite proud of the team and technology I built there (we made a ton of money for AMZN, Jeff liked us, the team is now 10x the size as when I left), the patents are descriptive of what we accomplished together:</p> | ||
| <ul> | ||
| <li>Anomaly Detection is <a href="/7574382.pdf">US Patent No 7,574,382</a></li> | ||
| <li>Competitive Pricing is <a href="/7740172.pdf">US Patent No 7,740,172</a></li> | ||
| </ul> | ||
| <h4 id="los-alamos-national-lab---student">Los Alamos National Lab - Student!</h4> | ||
| <p>Way back in the day while a student at Cornell, I worked as an intern on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. I wrote a simple C++ program to model something about the neutral current detectors. It’s been too long that I honestly don’t remember, but the team at LANL was awesome and I learned a great deal about science and a bit about software. Thanks Pete and Andy!</p> | ||
| <p>Oh, and the chief scientist behind SNO jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics 2015. Congratulations!</p> | ||
| <h4 id="also">Also…</h4> | ||
| <p>In 2017, I released my first Science Fiction novel! You can find <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Singular-Zack-Hubert-ebook/dp/B06X3VGBVP/">Singular</a> on Amazon and at other places where fine books are sold.</p> | ||
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| <p>This last week I was sitting with friends around a campfire and told the following true story. They found it rather interesting, so I figured it was worth retelling. The truth is, my career has been a really weird one…there’s nothing linear about any of the progression through work that I’ve chosen. It has been a truly wild ride, but I’m getting ahead of myself.</p> | ||
| <p>Amazon. 1999. It was a totally different company than it is now, though in many ways it’s probably still Day 1. Back then, no one believed in Amazon but us…the insiders, those that had drunk the kool-aid of the best business model for commerce (e-commerce…what a funny name now). There were so many people on “the street” that liked to write these scathing “Amazon will explode in a fiery ball of bankruptcy” stories that even the stalwart had their confidence shaken from time to time. I mean, how many times did I have to explain that I worked for a company that made no profit…sigh. Anyway, from the vantage point of 2014, it’s really easy to think it was a foregone conclusion, but for those of us in the “earlyish” times, it was an exhilirating wild west adventure.</p> | ||
| <p>My part in the story began when I joined on as a UNIX Administrator…it was an interesting role which was kind of a precursor to DevOps, at least for me anyway. One of my first projects was working on CMF, a configuration management framework that was mostly done but wasn’t working yet. I finished it off and it became the means (in those days) wherein we reliably built out servers. Of course, it had a tiny fraction of Chef or Puppet, but it was fun and worked for awhile.</p> | ||
| <p>But anyway, the inglorius part of being a UNIX Administrator was being on call. Oh, the oncall. Of course, I was single and working 80+ hour weeks, so what’s a few more hours in the middle of the night, right? Needless to say, it wears on you after awhile.</p> | ||
| <p>One particular oncall, I woke up to the pager going off at some ungodly hour (3am perhaps?). The site was completely browning out because ACB (the primary database, increasingly inaccurately named Amazon.com Books) was getting overwhelmed and something in the order pipeline was all jammed up.</p> | ||
| <p>These late night calls could be a lot of fun at times, as people of many different disciplines would come together and fix some crazy stuff (of course, there would always be some middle manager trying to expedite) but they were interesting to say the least.</p> | ||
| <p>This particular night, the root cause was a mispriced iPod in UK (I think). Instead of it being like £300.00, it was £3.00. Whoops, pricing mistake! It made it on some deal site and the rest was history.</p> | ||
| <p>Well, I’m not really a “status quo” person, nor really content to “just do my job”, so the next day I went into the office armed with my trusty weapon “Maths” (you see, I was in neutrino astrophysics before I came to Amazon, so I have some math experience) and a slightly trusty other weapon “Perl” and that day I made the ASIN Spike Report. What it could do was identify when anomalous activity was happening across the whole catalog of items and let the buyers know that they either:</p> | ||
| <p>had an item which just jumped in popularity or | ||
| a mispriced item. | ||
| As soon as I had the working prototype (same day), I didn’t know who to show it to. I asked around as to who might want to be on the email distribution (it emailed the instant stuff was identified as weird) and I was introduced to a buyer (name lost to the mists of time…sorry!) and he connected the dots to the whole group. It was a HUGE success and completely changed my career. They were able to use it for all sorts of things (like buying lots of inventory before other people knew there was a new best-seller).</p> | ||
| <p>From that moment, I became pricing guy and started working with tons of buyers from all different departments (even though I was still a UNIX Admin). Not too long afterwards, I was picked up by a Dr. Larson who was building a special team around pricing at Amazon. I won the “Just do it” award (thanks Jeff for the signed shoe!) and my first innovation award (a patent for the thing…note, I didn’t describe how it worked!). From there I transitioned to the Software side of things and have loved almost every minute of building things that help people do whatever it is that they do.</p> | ||
| <p>Anyway, that special team will have to be the topic for another time (it led to presenting to the Board…thanks Rick for doing most of the talking, brainstorming with the CTO/CIO over algorithms, a big bump in profit for the company and a great opportunity for me).</p> | ||
| <p>Amazon.com was a truly amazing experience.</p> | ||
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| <h2><a href="/articles/the-power-of-incremental-work/">The Power of Incremental Work</a></h2> | ||
| <p>Quite a while ago, I wrote a review of The New Turing Omnibus. A very clever book whose double entendre title reinforced the wit with which the subject matter was to be handled. In short, a very fun book that covers a lot of Computer Science topics. | ||
| What’s interesting though is how one tiny passage in the foreword changed my outlook on something important. Here it is: | ||
| Sometime during my childhood I encountered the traditional image of a bird that erodes a mountain by taking a single stone from it every year.</p> | ||
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| <h2><a href="/articles/an-amazon-story/">An Amazon Story</a></h2> | ||
| <p>This last week I was sitting with friends around a campfire and told the following true story. They found it rather interesting, so I figured it was worth retelling. The truth is, my career has been a really weird one…there’s nothing linear about any of the progression through work that I’ve chosen. It has been a truly wild ride, but I’m getting ahead of myself. | ||
| Amazon. 1999. It was a totally different company than it is now, though in many ways it’s probably still Day 1.</p> | ||
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| <description>Quite a while ago, I wrote a review of The New Turing Omnibus. A very clever book whose double entendre title reinforced the wit with which the subject matter was to be handled. In short, a very fun book that covers a lot of Computer Science topics.
What’s interesting though is how one tiny passage in the foreword changed my outlook on something important. Here it is:
Sometime during my childhood I encountered the traditional image of a bird that erodes a mountain by taking a single stone from it every year.</description> | ||
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| <title>An Amazon Story</title> | ||
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| <pubDate>Fri, 18 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate> | ||
| <guid>http://localhost:1313/articles/an-amazon-story/</guid> | ||
| <description>This last week I was sitting with friends around a campfire and told the following true story. They found it rather interesting, so I figured it was worth retelling. The truth is, my career has been a really weird one…there’s nothing linear about any of the progression through work that I’ve chosen. It has been a truly wild ride, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Amazon. 1999. It was a totally different company than it is now, though in many ways it’s probably still Day 1.</description> | ||
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| <p>Quite a while ago, I wrote a review of The New Turing Omnibus. A very clever book whose double entendre title reinforced the wit with which the subject matter was to be handled. In short, a very fun book that covers a lot of Computer Science topics.</p> | ||
| <p>What’s interesting though is how one tiny passage in the foreword changed my outlook on something important. Here it is:</p> | ||
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| Sometime during my childhood I encountered the traditional image of a bird that erodes a mountain by taking a single stone from it every year. In time, a mountain may disappear by this method – and appear elsewhere. That was my feeling about the Incremental growth of The Turing Omnibus from 1981 to 1988 when I completed the first draft, astonished once more at the power of Incremental work. | ||
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| <p>Now I had heard that fable before, about the bird moving mountains, and in many other contexts as well. It’s certainly not a new concept, we do it every day at work slicing a big product into component features, but here’s the deal: reading it in the context of personal projects it took on a new meaning for me.</p> | ||
| <h2 id="burning-the-candle">Burning the Candle</h2> | ||
| <p>Let’s say you’re in your twenties right now, or in another time of life where you have few dependents and a great deal of evening time on your hands. If you wanted to sink six hours a night into a side project, there’s nothing standing in your way. You can do these extended sessions for as long as and often as your personal willpower would dictate.</p> | ||
| <p>For me, when I was in that time of life, I was a notorious sprinter. At Amazon I was inculcated by the long hours and even stayed the night in the office when necessary, and since I was already an overachiever, that carried forward with me. After Amazon, I took those evening hours and applied them to side project after side project and to learning a whole raft of technologies.</p> | ||
| <p>But then I got married and we started a family. I simply didn’t have the time anymore to devote to extended sessions. For a short time, I stopped ingesting new technologies and new books altogether, there was too much going on. Great things, wonderful things, things I would never trade, and yet I wanted to be intentional about what time I had each day.</p> | ||
| <p>I have a little bit of time that I can spend in the evening or early morning. Or, I can encounter Resistance (read the War of Art) and choose to squander that time with TV or some other activity. As an aside, I think play is an essential part of life, so don’t get all black and white on me here, but I just think play is best once the work is all done. And play is best done with family and friends.</p> | ||
| <p>Anyway, I resolved a long time ago that I wanted to continuously learn and always be improving in all the areas to which I dedicate myself. I want to be a better software developer, a better family man, and a better friend. Each of these things can be viewed as a mountain to be moved, requiring intentionality and purpose of action over a long period of time.</p> | ||
| <p>The problem with the metaphor is that a mountain is finite, whereas these goals are “infinite games”, ones that have no completion except when we stop playing (as opposed to finite games that we play all the time which have points and victory conditions).</p> | ||
| <h2 id="incremental-work">Incremental Work</h2> | ||
| <p>In short, I’ve adopted a different view. In the context of these infinite games, the only victory condition is to continue playing, which means showing up each and every day to move the needle just a little bit. Read a few pages, squeeze in some more time for audio books, hit the web for actual learning and not mindless tech news, put a little bit of time into that art project or health regimen that you were always meaning to do. Just do it every single day. No more excuses and no more devaluing how important it is.</p> | ||
| <p>As the author of The New Turing Omnibus was surprised to discover, one day you wake up to the completion of a task you would have never thought possible to finish. Even those infinite goals show incredible progress when you measure them over a long enough period of time.</p> | ||
| <p>The key is to not lose heart, and to never give up. Every little piece of dirt was once a part of that mountain. Or, to pick another fable, eventually the Tortoise will outrun the Hare. Keep moving!</p> | ||
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