Marc Brooker

They tend to be people who are personally very honest about their level of knowledge and understanding and skill.

Yeah, I mean, you know, just fantastic.

One of the blessings of working at a place like AWS is I get to work with so many great people.

You know, maybe because he's retired, I'll talk a little bit about...

original, say, huge contributor to the design of S3, a really big contributor to the design of a lot of our database services over time.

Al was actually the CTO of Amazon for a period of time when he realized, I think, that wasn't the job he wanted to do.

But what I really admired about Al from early in my career is...

you know, very clearly he was somebody who deeply understood the things he was doing and he could work in these two modes, right?

Like, you know, I have a great memory of sort of 2010-ish, you know, arguing with Al about some of the edge cases in the Paxos paper and, you know, he was super deep at that level but could also get up to the really kind of executive level and talk about,

you know cloud strategy and the way we should be explaining things to people and some of the you know sort of fundamental things that we need to be building um and i really admired that ability to work sort of almost at every level and i was like wow you know this is this is something i aspire to um and uh you know want to model my want to model my own career after um

And so, you know, I think that is, you know, the kind of person I've really, you know, really enjoyed working with is people who do have that, you know, do have that breadth.

And I think, you know, one of the other things that is really admirable about a lot of these folks is, you know, they don't want to be celebrities, right?

They want to do cool work for, you know, have an impact, do great stuff for customers, you know, optimize for having impact.

Anybody who's building distributed system things, I highly recommend Martin Kleppmann's book.

I think there's a second edition of that coming out soon.

There's a new edition of Quantitative Systems Design book, which I also think is great.

Hennessy and Patterson's Computer Architecture book.

This is a super useful one that covers a ton of ground.

I read a ton of fiction and nonfiction and mostly papers when I'm reading technical things.

I find engaging at that level more useful for me.