Werner Vogels

We continue to keep ownership of what we do.

We continue to need to learn the next language, the next tool, the next system that we built.

And, you know, we need to know more.

than just that one piece.

We need to be more than that.

And my favorite, and he comes back in almost every presentation that I give, was Jim Gray.

He won the Turing Award.

He's the guy that actually built System R at IBM, the inventor of transactions.

Jim was brilliant.

Absolutely brilliant.

There's an article, if you want to look it up, it's called 20 Questions to Jim Gray.

Jim said, give me 20 business questions or questions that you as a user of a database would want to answer the database, that have the database answer.

I will build a database for you.

And by the way, one of the most interesting questions is he walks into the room where the big machinery is, and he hears the disks rattling, and he looks sideways and he listens to disk.

He says, your database layout is wrong.

That was something he could hear.

But he was not just a database expert.

He had a lot of other skills in other areas.

And so he was what we would call a T-developer.

An I-developer is someone that knows only one thing.