New podcast episode of Code with Jason with David

Jason Swett invited me on his podcast Code with Jason - a fellow Michigander. It turns out Jason is based just around 1-2 hours from where I grew up. And the podcast recorded during a rare Seattle thunderstorm - something that evokes nostalgia for me because while they're (very) rare in Seattle, they're common in Michigan, and I kind of miss them.

The conversation starter was on the last 20 years of AWS. I just passed my official "20 years at Amazon" milestone last week, which depending on how I exactly count it, was anywhere between 15-17.5 years at AWS, and the rest working for Amazon.com where I automated operations of the web server fleet.

It's amazing to think about how much of the stuff I've done over the last 17.5 years at AWS have been motivated by stuff that I found annoying while working on that first team. Scaling forecasting, code deployments, database operations, server operations, incident management, production service troubleshooting and observability, and even annoying client/server communication and SDKs (or a lack thereof).

We talked about making AWS' web service framework (think gRPC), and picking an abstraction that is easy to use out of the box, but not overbearing or restricting. Jason likened that design goal to Grafana, which lets you have a bunch of easy dashboards, but also lets you customize to your heart's content.

It was funny when I brought up the weekly AWS ops meeting, where Jason stopped me and asked for clarification: "...wait what do you mean everybody in AWS gets together?" The weekly ops meeting has changed shape a little bit from time to time, but it does involve representation from all service teams in AWS sharing what we've learned about ops with each other, from victories, to hard learned lessons.

We also talked a lot about testing. I shared how Kiro helps me with property-based testing and spec-driven development to make sure the agent stays on track and course corrects - essentially how tests help agents play bumper-bowling instead of regular bowling. Jason had a lot to share about testing too, and how he got coding agents to be more effective when he prompted it to do mutation testing instead of standard unit test boundary-case testing. Jason knows a lot about testing, and has his own testing guide The Beginners Guide to Rails Testing.

Anyway it was a fun chat Jason, thanks for having me on your podcast!