terabyte

Prologue

I wrote this answer on stackexchange, here: https://stackoverflow.com/posts/12597919/

It was wrongly deleted for containing "proprietary information" years later. I think that's bullshit so I am posting it here. Come at me.

The Question

Amazon is a SOA system with 100s of services (or so says Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels). How do they handle build and release?

koreno

Prebase

git-prebase improves on 'git rebase -i' by adding information per commit regarding which files it touched.

• Each file gets an alpha-numeric identifier at a particular column, a list of which appears below the commit list. (The identifiers wrap around after the 62nd file)
• Commits can be moved up and down safely (without conflicts) as long as their columns don't clash (they did not touch the same file).

Installation

Add the executable to your path and git will automatically expose it as

terabyte

Using Gist to Blog

Seems like gists are a great way to quickly publish easily-browseable blog entries using git, which is pretty much the easiest tool for me. Furthermore, github's markdown language is particularly well-suited for blogs which will contain lots of code snippets.

Like this:

    require 'foo'
    puts "Hello, #{World}!"
 exit 0

BrockA

/*--- waitForKeyElements():  A utility function, for Greasemonkey scripts,
    that detects and handles AJAXed content.

    Usage example:

        waitForKeyElements (
            "div.comments"
            , commentCallbackFunction
        );

chitchcock

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real