https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse452/23wi/papers/yegge-platform-rant.html “Steve Yegge’s Google Platforms Rant” (Steve used to work at Amazon):

So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He’s doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion – back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year – he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.

His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.
2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
3. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
4. It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols – doesn’t matter. Bezos doesn’t care.
5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
6. Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.
7. Thank you; have a nice day!

Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.

6, however, was quite real, so people went to work.

http://notebook.maryrosecook.com/SteveYeggeonJeffBezos.html “Steve Yegge on Jeff Bezos”

To prepare a presentation for Jeff, first make damn sure you know everything there is to know about the subject. Then write a prose narrative explaining the problem and solution(s). Write it exactly the way you would write it for a leading professor or industry expert on the subject. That is: assume he already knows everything about it. Assume he knows more than you do about it. Even if you have groundbreakingly original ideas in your material, just pretend it’s old hat for him. Write your prose in the succinct, direct, no-explanations way that you would write for a world-leading expert on the material. You’re almost done. The last step before you’re ready to present to him is this: Delete every third paragraph.

Back in the mid-1800s there was this famous-ish composer/pianist named Franz Liszt. He is widely thought to have been the greatest sight-reader who ever lived. He could sight-read anything you gave him, including crazy stuff not even written for piano, like opera scores. He was so staggeringly good at sight-reading that his brain was only fully engaged on the first run-through. After that he’d get bored and start embellishing with his own additions.

Bezos is so goddamned smart that you have to turn it into a game for him or he’ll be bored and annoyed with you. That was my first realization about him. Who knows how smart he was before he became a billionaire – let’s just assume it was “really frigging smart”, since he did build Amazon from scratch. But for years he’s had armies of people taking care of everything for him. He doesn’t have to do anything at all except dress himself in the morning and read presentations all day long. So he’s really, REALLY good at reading presentations. He’s like the Franz Liszt of sight-reading presentations.

So you have to start tearing out whole paragraphs, or even pages, to make it interesting for him. He will fill in the gaps himself without missing a beat. And his brain will have less time to get annoyed with the slow pace of your brain.

You have to understand: most people were scared around Bezos because they were waaaay too worried about trying to keep their jobs. People in high-level positions sometimes have a little too much personal self-esteem invested in their success. Can you imagine how annoying it must be for him to be around timid people all day long? But me – well, I thought I was going to get fired every single day. So fuck timid. Might as well aim high and go out in a ball of flame.

From what I could tell, Jeff is a hear-no-evil, see-no-evil kind of person who was focused on the mission. It didn’t matter if the toilet was dirty or if engineers were being paged all night long. He seemed to only care if it started slowing him down. Maybe that’s the kind of leader you have to be. Successful leaders don’t take no for an answer.

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/math-every-day

Great writing about Neumann’s genius, math and computers.

These days he works with AI coding company Sourcegraph:

https://sourcegraph.com/blog/revenge-of-the-junior-developer

So anyway, I ripped a fart the other day that sounded like viiiibecooode, and I was immediately approached by 3 investors. I had to tell them no sorry that was just a fart, just to get them off me.