Kauai

how ya been?

I haven’t posted to this blog since mid-2020. So, what happened? Well, there was a global pandemic that went on and on. In the midst of all the change, around the time I stopped posting here, I had a thought.

I don’t want this pandemic to end and still be doing the same things at the end as I was at the start.

Motivated to change in some meaningful way, I dusted off my old resume, refreshed LinkedIn and began hitting apply buttons worldwide. One day, a recruiter at Amazon DM’d me. I crammed leetcode and studied Cracking the Coding Interview before the dreaded “loop” interview. Long story short, I got the job and went to my favorite doughnut shop to celebrate (s/o Top Pot).

Since then, I’ve been super busy at work, letting my blog rust. I got to do some pretty neat things at Amazon. In my first team, we owned multifactor authentication for employees. Our primary app was the all-in-one intranet for employee services at Amazon. We supported +30 single-sign-on integrations to allow low-friction egress from intranet to first-party and third-party applications for payroll, benefits, and more. At the time, COVID-19 was creating immense pressure on global supply chains while also driving up demand for e-commerce. The number of employees at Amazon reached new heights, particularly at fulfillment centers, where most Amazonians work.

In an effort to social distance, these FC employees began to use our workforce app to clock-in on-site. It became vital to improve MFA to prevent it from becoming a bottleneck. Over time my incredible team shipped improvement after improvement to the login experience.

Eventually, a new requirement came up to expand some employee resources to former workers, such as continuing benefits and tax documents. The critical challenge to this was that all of our internal systems were designed to block access to external parties. I needed to integrate our apps with a new auth provider and then carve a secure lane of limited access for former employees to use in our app. This was a fun and challenging project that pushed me to grow. Today, many people use this feature to get self-service post-employment support.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

After all that, it was time for another change. I branched out to a young, new team, Amazon Privacy. At the end of COVID-19 I moved to Austin, TX, (more on that later). Privacy was an Austin-based team with a relatable mission. First, I helped ship the Digital Markets Act (DMA) privacy experience for Amazon Shopping. It was an exciting and rigorous task for our brand new team that brought us closer together. I also accomplished an ambition of mine: to take part in customer journey on the world’s biggest e-commerce website.

The next project I launched was collecting Cookie Consent in Quebec. I learned so much by extending and eventually rearchitecting consent collection for Amazon Stores. A fundamental shift I made to the process was to move consent collection from a centralized backend service, where it frequently impacted sitewide latency, to a frontend request that runs in parallel with the page-load. This new dynamic is helping to decouple the workflow from latency of rendering the core CX.

on a personal note

I have been doing new things outside of work too. Having enough rain to last a lifetime, I packed up and moved to Austin, TX. I bought my first house, I started playing pickleball and working out Nike Studios, a new HIIT venture. I love Austin for its quaintness, a city that has not fully grown out of its small town vibe. At the same time, it’s constantly growing. Since moving here, at least six new boba tea spots have opened up with more on the way. I’m bullish on Austin, and it has treated me well.

what’s next?

I have a lot of plans for seedshare. I started a backlog of things to write about and example projects to play with. Here are a few:

• WebAssembly
• crypto webapp
• GenAI and GenUI
• WebGL
• leetcode examples
• non-technical words of advice

Additionally, I want to develop a feature on this site to offer consultations and mock interviews. My original passion for this site was a place and platform to inspire other developers. With that in mind, I hope to see you here again soon!

a postscript

I want to spend less time on screens. Programming all day at work and blogging by night challenges that. So I am trying something new. I wrote this entire post by hand! Then, I uploaded photos of my terrible penmanship to Claude, and asked it to transcribe it in markdown. This is the result. Not bad! More to come…

p.p.s.: getting this blog up and running again was a piece of work! But it is a labor of love ♥.