24 Jul 2006
I was at the Steve Nash Charity Classic this past Saturday in Vancouver. Overall it was an impressive event with the supporting evidence available here.
The Vancouver Province has excellent coverge on Steve’s charity endeavors. In fact, the basketball court that’s mentioned is just a couple km’s up to the road.
It’s nice to see a local kid enjoy his successes but not forget where he came from. It was amazing to see how involved the community was in the event.
The afternoon before the game a city block was cordoned off and a Fan Fest setup with charity booths and various interactive events for kids of all ages. The place was packed!
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22 Jul 2006
Just about to head to Vancouver to watch the Steve Nash Charity Classic.
Being a Victoria native, this event is something I’ve been looking forward to for awhile now. It also doesn’t hurt that I’ll be sitting center court and in the first row.
Pictures of the event will follow.
22 Jul 2006
Amazon is all about scale. In recent presentations I have been demonstrating how Amazon Engineers are scalability experts who can take any concept idea and turn it into a service that can serve hundreds of customers and then grow it seamlessly to support hundreds of millions of customers. In the Amazon world there is no such thing as a limited beta; everything needs to be production quality when it launches and scale in every possible dimension. Incremental scalability is a key fundamental concept in all of our designs such that we can handle growth reliably and cost-effectively.
Caught this description of how Amazon approaches scalability in Werner Vogel‘s blog about Geoff Arnold joining the Amazon team.
The last point is important and something I’m trying to drive home at GenoLogics (a smallish 50 person start-up with plenty of growth oportunities and fun problems to solve). It’s an interesting nut for us to crack with product management having an overriding emphasis on being feature driven and those of us on the architecture team concerned with building infrastructure to enable efficiency, both in development time and physical resources.
We definitely don’t have the same enterprise requirements as an Amazon.com so incremental scalability hasn’t been and likely won’t be a top 3 concern, but it’s something not to be sacrificed because demand will *increase, standards *will emerge and larger customers *will *continue to come on board. There’s a certain expectation to meet without falling off the deep end of over-engineering.
Plus, it’s a fun to tackles these problems in a start-up environment where you’ve got the relative freedom to innovate and see immediate impact.
We’re hiring too (send your resumes to adam -AT- jordens -DOT- org).