I wonder where the spray painted sign went: twitter.com/profgalloway/status/1229952158667288576/photo/1. As mentioned at officechai.com/startups/amazon-first-office/ and elsewhere, Jeff did all he could to save money, e.g. he made the desks himself from pieces of wood. Mentioned e.g. at youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=345 from Video 4. "Jeff Bezos presentation at MIT (2002)".
Jeff Bezos interview by Chuck Films (1997)
Source. On the street, with a lot of car noise. CC BY-SA, nice.Order from Bulgaria by Jeff Bezos (2002)
Source. Full video: Video 4. "Jeff Bezos presentation at MIT (2002)"- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=220 why Seattle: tech talent, and nearest to the largest book warehouse in Roseburg Oregon
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=232 first hire, VP of Engineering, Shel Kaphan
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=267 screenshot of the first version. Can't find any working version from before 2000 on web.archive.org/web/19990601000000*/amazon.com unfortunately.
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=303 kadabra/cadaver
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=345 Shel, how tall do you want your desk to be?
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=610 order from Bulgaria: Video 3. "Order from Bulgaria by Jeff Bezos (2002)"
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=733 customers don't really know what they want. One is reminded of Steve Jobs customers don't know what they want quote
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=1010 item merging in a single package from warehouse
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=1187 and other points mentions repeatedly how much effort they've put into result personalization. But of course, that also means tracking everything people do. Including users that are not logged in. Would not fly well in 2020's increasing privacy concerns!
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=1251 A/B testing
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=1314 passes word to employee Robert Frederick, MIT alumni, black dude, AWS manager
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=1517 demos something in AWS
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=2171 Jeff's back
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=2312 similarity searches on some somewhat perverted for-male books. Golden. 2020's political correctness would never allow that in a presentation. A bit further ahead mentions they've optimized to run it in "small machines" with only 2GB RAM, still likely large for the time. Also mentions that if you do it naively, then you're going to say "also bought Harry Potter" for everyone (hugely popular book at the time). You've got to work harder to do better non obvious recommendations.
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=2409 warehouse uses a technique called random stow, which store items randomly.
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=2563 OXO Good Grips Salad Spinner. The reviews must be fake, but Jeff doesn't recognize it. Priceless. Still on sale: www.amazon.co.uk/OXO-Good-Grips-Salad-Spinner/dp/B009KCFHAW
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=2599 decentralized pub/sub pattern, cache warming
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=2685 "you've bought this previously feature" that reduces sales: people forget they bought things and buy them a second time!
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=2938 vote fraud after someone from crowd mentions. God reviewed the Bible.
- youtu.be/J2xGBlT0cqY?t=3253 hiring slide with contact jeff@amazon.com Send your CV, today!
Jeff Bezos Revealed by Bloomberg (2015)
Source. cosine by Jeff Bezos (2018)
Source. Yasantha Rajakarunanayake: twitter.com/yasantha62/status/1042052665893511168.
Bibliography:
- archive.ph/ucSHN This is what it was like to work at Amazon 20 years ago (2015). Good annecdotes from the first offices.
Steve Jobs has a great quote about this. He's totally right on this one!
You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to sell it.
Steve Jobs Insult Response excerpt from the 1997 WWDC
. Source. TODO understand the context of the question a bit better. It is something to do with an OpenDoc thing and Java.Decide your goal first, and then do whatever is needed to how to reach it.
Don't start randomly learning tech, because that means you will waste a lot of time learning useless stuff.
There is of course some level chicken-and-egg paradox in this, as highlighted by Dilbert, since choosing an achievable goal in the first place requires some level of technical understanding.
However, it is much more common that people will get way too involved in learning useless stuff and lose sight of the useful end goals.
Rather, take an iterative approach:
There is some truth to the counter argument that "but if you don't spend a lot of time learning the basics, you can never find solutions".
However, these people underestimate your brain. The brain is beautiful, and human intuition is capable of generating interest towards the things that are actually useful to reach your goal. When you feel like learning something related to your goal, by all means, give yourself the time to do so. But this still be much more efficient than just learning random things that other people tell you to learn.
Bibliography:
- Ciro Santilli and many many others believe that backward design is a fundamental principle that should be considered by the educational system rather than wasting 90% of everyone's time with the 90% of mandatory curricula they don't care about:
- notably that school should be personalized and project driven:
- www.cartalk.com/content/rant-and-rave-36 "The New Theory of Learning" by Thomas L. Magliozzi section "Premise III: THE BACKWARDS LEARNING THEORY" says the exact same thing. Ciro actually found this when writing Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain.
- several well known teaching methods:
- a Coding Horror software specific take on this issue: blog.codinghorror.com/please-dont-learn-to-code/
- x.com/7etsuo/status/1784787045157900697: George Hotz
Everyone I've met who can program well learned it the same way: they had an idea, and then they built it.
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.