1 hr 8 min
What It Was like to Be Amazon’s 5th Software Engineer | Eric Benson Invent like an Owner with Dave Schappell
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- Careers
Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Eric Benson to discuss his myriad early software engineering projects at a time when Amazon was rapidly growing as a company. He implemented Book Matcher (which didn’t last long) and the Similarities feature, and later built the original version of Weblabs that helped test which Amazon features were optimal. Eric also mentored many of the new software engineers, and later worked to port Amazon from Digital Unix to Linux (along with Bob Vadnais, and others).
Eric Benson joined Amazon in 1996 as the 5th software engineer. He is currently a Software Consultant at United States Digital Service (USDS), a government agency composed of a group of technologists from diverse backgrounds working across the federal government to transform critical services for the people.
Episode Resources:
Eric Benson’s LinkedIn and TwitterFind Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter
What to Listen For:
00:00 Intro02:39 Amazon's multi-day outage in 199705:15 Back then there was no backup server, just one customer database07:09 Joining Amazon in 199610:00 Improving the website software was one of the first tasks12:52 Book Matcher: people get recommendations after posting a rating15:36 Developing the Similarities feature24:10 Instant Recommendations 25:31 Promoting unusual items to show up in recommendations27:00 Building v1 of Weblabs34:16 People get burned out when there’s too much information37:34 CatSubst is putting marks in the HTML file to notify the software it serves39:44 Experimenting between showing 3 and 5 similar items41:09 Is every new feature slowing down the site?42:54 The biggest problem with CatSubst45:11 The hardware cost per unit was very high49:21 Hardships of the engineering team while using Linux53:27 Rufus the Dog and several site launches57:26 Helping new engineers with language and coding01:01:13 Software engineering at Amazon was too advanced for packaged software solutions from 3rd parties01:04:05 From a small business to becoming a huge company
Today, in the Invent Like An Owner Podcast, Dave speaks with Eric Benson to discuss his myriad early software engineering projects at a time when Amazon was rapidly growing as a company. He implemented Book Matcher (which didn’t last long) and the Similarities feature, and later built the original version of Weblabs that helped test which Amazon features were optimal. Eric also mentored many of the new software engineers, and later worked to port Amazon from Digital Unix to Linux (along with Bob Vadnais, and others).
Eric Benson joined Amazon in 1996 as the 5th software engineer. He is currently a Software Consultant at United States Digital Service (USDS), a government agency composed of a group of technologists from diverse backgrounds working across the federal government to transform critical services for the people.
Episode Resources:
Eric Benson’s LinkedIn and TwitterFind Dave on LinkedIn and Twitter
What to Listen For:
00:00 Intro02:39 Amazon's multi-day outage in 199705:15 Back then there was no backup server, just one customer database07:09 Joining Amazon in 199610:00 Improving the website software was one of the first tasks12:52 Book Matcher: people get recommendations after posting a rating15:36 Developing the Similarities feature24:10 Instant Recommendations 25:31 Promoting unusual items to show up in recommendations27:00 Building v1 of Weblabs34:16 People get burned out when there’s too much information37:34 CatSubst is putting marks in the HTML file to notify the software it serves39:44 Experimenting between showing 3 and 5 similar items41:09 Is every new feature slowing down the site?42:54 The biggest problem with CatSubst45:11 The hardware cost per unit was very high49:21 Hardships of the engineering team while using Linux53:27 Rufus the Dog and several site launches57:26 Helping new engineers with language and coding01:01:13 Software engineering at Amazon was too advanced for packaged software solutions from 3rd parties01:04:05 From a small business to becoming a huge company
1 hr 8 min