Marc Brooker

And I think when I look at – I think that's always been true.

I think it is wider than ever before.

But when I look at the engineering leaders that I've really respected and learned a huge amount from over my career, for example, some of the folks who built S3 20 years ago,

that was such a successful product because those folks were so deep in the details and so grounded on the use cases and so deep in the economics and really just did, you know, really thought about both the kind of strategic world of like, how is this cloud thing gonna change the way people want to interact with storage?

But also the minute to minute details of what's fast now, what's slow, what's good, what's bad.

And I think when you think about a extremely enduring product like S3,

or EC2, I think it's been that groundedness in the details from early on, from all levels of leadership that has made those things so successful, where other products seemingly with the same amount of early promise didn't turn out to be as successful.

Writing and speaking, but especially writing, have this incredible power.

And for technical folks, it's this incredible multiplier in being able to take these ideas that's in your head and share them with the world.

and you can take a set of technical ideas in your head and share them with the world by building a great product, and that's a fantastic thing to do.

You can share them in the world kind of one-on-one, mentorship, teach people, learn, small groups, also a great way to spend time.

But the multiplication factor of doing a talk or even more of writing something is so much higher.

There are so many more people that you can share that with and it lasts for a much longer period of time.

And so just having something written on my blog, even that I wrote like a decade ago that I can share with someone and say, here's how to think about this problem, here's an insight that I wanted to share with you, or have people discover that organically is just super powerful.

And so writing lets you scale out the impact of your expertise in space and time in a way that's really hard to do in other media.

I think with video and with podcasts and so on, you know, we've seen other ways to do that.

But I think writing remains kind of uniquely powerful.

And then there's also this idea, which is this kind of core belief culturally at Amazon, and I've obviously been affected by this over the years, that writing forces a level of mental clarity that speaking, making slide decks, et cetera, doesn't.

And that's something that has also really been my experience of sitting down to write something down forces me to think that through

at a depth that I wouldn't have been, been forced to think it through without that.