Sunday, April 3, 2011

Entrepreneur to Amazonian : The Amazon Vortex

So, I used to be an entrepreneur/super consultant until I realized it wasn't making me happy. Happiness is a precarious thing. Ultimately, happiness boils down to aligning your calling with a profession that earns your keep (See Dan Pink's book Drive). The reality is that I'm not so much an entrepreneur as I am an inventor. Fundamentally, my callings are inventing, optimizing, educating, studying, building, proving things, using math, having fun with computers, and being right (a lot).

One day, I read Hamming's speech via pg, and it reminded me of why I was in academia: I want to work on great problems. I left academia to work on a super problem, but that failed. I thought about returning to academia, but I would have probably become a crank with gray hairs working on some crazy type system complaining about something.

Instead of writing papers that few will read, I want happy customers that benefit from my work. So, I decided to try an new job. I traced from my recent work and passion in Big Data and worked back-words, and get a job.

The first company on my list was Amazon Web Services, and now I work there. I'm working in the S3 team.

This means three things: (1) I have a Big Data problem (really big), (2) I'm under an NDA, and (3) I'm working with Protoss again.

So, like the Google Vortex, I'm now in the Amazon vortex. This fundamentally means my blog is going to change. I'll probably stop writing on technical things for a while. When I head to the mountains, I'll post pics.

1 comment:

  1. That's funny. Somehow I just stumbled upon this random post in my work day. The story of how I got here doesn't seems to convey any particular sense, but at the same time, what I just read appeal so much to me that I could have written it myself.

    This morning, I was looking for a programming language that would compile in PHP for some reason. I typed "compiling languages php" into google and found various links. From link to link, following a thread on kira, I finally landed on this very page of this very blog and that was it.

    Internet is so strange...

    Anyway, it's now in my bookmarks so I can come back later and read more of it. Have a nice day !

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