Amazon TechO(n)

The good and the bads

I registered for Amazon TechO(n) @ Iași quite early, eager to see Iași for the first time and meet the people behind Amazon Romania.

Two of my colleagues and me traveled to Iași by train (the old fashioned way), and stayed at the Moldova Hotel. The journey was quite fun and except a beer flying in the train at some point — without incidents. The hotel was OK, the view is one of its +1s, even though you will see the “bad” side of the Palace of Culture — the good side is in the picture ☺.

Who talked and about what you ask?

Talk #1:

Peter Commons spoke about working @Amazon. They have some guidelines which are like the Ten Commandments, and receive a badge for each thing they do. He’s been at Amazon for a long time, and was one of the people who helped grow the Romanian office. Most of the people “worked for him” not “with him”…

Talk #2:

Ralf Herbrich — Smart. Smart. Smart guy. He spoke about Machine Learning — what’s ML exactly and how they use it to solve problems. He has a powerful background in Mathematics and worked at Microsoft for a long time. He moved back to Berlin (his hometown) and if you have a chance to attend one of his talks just grab the opportunity by it’s tail.

Talk #3:

Ryan Ernst — another smart guy. He didn’t have the same charisma as Ralf, but I understood (I think) the way they decode/encode to enhance their search response time. He works at an Amazon subsidiary and is a contributor to Lucene.

And now the talks split in two tracks, presented by Romanian engineers.

Talk #4

Mihai Birsan — about Amazon web services. Well… he did a sales pitch on the services they provide (and don’t). If you were a noobie you could have been impressed, but not this girl — even if I only scratch the surface of knowledge in this area.

Things started to discourage us, the conference started well but would it be the same until the end?

Talk #4

Eugen Babinciuc — about TLS and SSL. After two minutes I said: “Kill me now, because this will do it and slowly…”. Awful. The presentation was bad, his grammar was bad, the information was like taken from a bad version of Wipikedia. It was like a PowerPoint made at 2 AM for the next morning.

Talk #5

Lucian Cornea — the road to a message passing architecture. I liked the guy, he made a quick intro in why and how one should design an infrastructure like this — and not with a shared memory. But the audience was blocked on the phrase: “It’s a race condition” …

Talk #6

Mihai Diac and Adrian Buzgar — kanban. These guys were chill, smart and different. They spoke about using kanban as a development method in their team and why it worked for them. After the conference these were the guys I looked for to ask some questions. Their team seemed pretty awesome from many points of view. Good job ☺!

Overall the conference was a 6-ish out of 10. I’m glad I had the chance to go there, it was my fun — my colleagues are awesome ☺. If you haven’t been to conferences and you would like to start, I recommend it.

P.S.: We didn’t visit the tree of Eminescu, we just ate at his bodega and we didn’t like it.