How to Make an Impact in the Engineering Industry?

Listen to AWS.fm: https://aws.fm/episodes/episode-25-shawn-swyx-wang

Shawn joins Adam to discuss Amplify and its place in the developer ecosystem, whether we should care about Cloudflare, yet, and how to cope with the anxiety that can come with being extremely online. Also, it sounds like Adam is a tech bro and he's NOT happy about it.

Transcript

Adam Elmore: Hey, everyone. Welcome to AWS FM, a podcast with guests from around the AWS community. I'm your host, Adam Elmore. And today, I'm joined by Shawn Swyx Wang. Hi, Shawn.

Shawn Wang: Hey, Adam. How's it going?

Adam Elmore: It's going well. I've been extremely excited. I've said this on a ton of podcasts, that I'm excited to get on with a guest, but this has been a long time because before I took my break, I was going to get on with you. Took a big, long break, and I've finally got you on. You're somebody, and I'm going to say a lot of things, I'm very dramatic, but you're somebody that I really admire in the online space. You have this ability to think about things, and distill them, and put them out there in a way that I admire greatly. I'm so excited to have you on here. It's going to be hard for me to stay on any one topic because I have just a list of questions I want to ask you, basically.

Shawn Wang: [inaudible 00:00:52].

Adam Elmore: First, could you tell everyone on this show who you are, just the short version of Shawn?

Shawn Wang: Yeah. So I'm Shawn, born and raised in Singapore, went to The States for college and then spent my first career in finance where I did investment banking and hedge funds. Loved the coding part because every junior finance person starts to learn to code, and didn't like the stress of the finance part, so I pivoted to tech where I was a software engineer at Two Sigma and then I was in developer relations at Netlify, AWS, Temporal, and I've just joined Airbyte as head of developer experience.

Adam Elmore: Oh, I did not know you weren't still at Temporal. So Airbyte, what is Airbyte?

Shawn Wang: Airbyte is a data integration company, it basically has the largest community of open-source connectors for connecting to any SaaS API source into your data warehouse. So for anyone doing data engineering, the first task that you have to do is to get data from all the different silos of data in your business. Let's say you have a Salesforce being the source of truth for customers, Stripe being the source of truth for transactions, get all of them into a single data warehouse for you to do operations on. So the goal is to have the largest community of open-source developers for connecting all the data and liberating your data from all the silos that you have in your business.

Adam Elmore: And how long ago did you start? How did I miss this?

Shawn Wang: A couple weeks ago. I actually have not announced it on Twitter, which is why.

Adam Elmore: Oh, there you go.

Shawn Wang: I like to slow play it. So when I joined Temporal, I actually waited for six months to really understand Temporal and to practice my pitch before announcing it on Twitter. And that's how I like to do things because, well, partially I want to be fully up to speed before I represent something publicly.

Adam Elmore: Yeah. So I want to talk about that. You get very up to speed in a way that I don't see a lot of people on Twitter. I don't see them understand things in the way that you do. So you obviously write, your blog is a huge source of information for me, and I've enjoyed it quite a lot, but it's not just that you write, it's the way you think about things. Does that come from your finance, your analytical background in finance, or were you like that before, your ability to see the whole forest, take in the way things are trending and the way things are moving, put it all together and distill it into these wonderful articles? Where does that come from?

Shawn Wang: Oh, so first of all, thanks for the very kind words. I don't hear back from my readers that often, so it's really nice when I get to talk to someone like this. So yeah, I would say a lot of this stuff is actually from my finance days. This is the kind of analysis that you would have to do when you do an investment report or investment research on any stock or any industry. You want to get a perspective of what's going on, what the trends are, who the major players are, and form an opinion on where things are going. And I think taking that finance mindset into the bets I have, in terms of technologies, whether or not it's for using them personally in my personal stack or for joining them as a startup employee, I think is extremely underrated. And it's something I'm trying to model and hopefully teach people someday.

Shawn Wang: Although I'm not sure about the teaching part, because if I say like, "Get rich by doing investment analysis stock on early stage startups," I would feel like a hustler. So maybe not that, but I just do like engaging in that. And probably it's an exercise for me to think things through clearly by writing it down. And I also get a lot of feedback from that, so I actually improve and learn a lot by learning in public. And that's the other thing that I am pretty well known for, so this is the application of the general purpose learning in public principle.

Adam Elmore: Yeah. No, and I love your learning in public article. I hope more people see how you break down systems and the world around us and distill it. I hope more people do that because I'd love to have more sources of that kind of information. It's really fascinating and that's a lot of what I want to talk about today is your opinions on the future and where certain things are headed. First, I want to talk, you did work at AWS. How long were you at AWS?

Shawn Wang: A year. AWS Amplify.

Adam Elmore: Yeah. So I'd love to know, I guess what it was like working at AWS, what you took from that, but also more broadly, I want to get into Amplify and where it fits. You sort of live in that intersection. I feel like web, and cloud, and infrastructure, where things are trending, and I want to talk Amplify's place in that, but first, what was your role there like at AWS, at Amplify?

Shawn Wang: Yeah, I was a senior dev advocate at Amplify, basically doing demos and talks for Amplify. And the fun thing about working at Amplify is that you are essentially also a developer advocate for all the underlying services. So amplify is essentially a roll up of DynamoDB, API Gateway, AWS AppSync, even file storage like S3. You could do some demos with that. And I did, I made like a DIY Dropbox clone. But it's focus on front-end engineers. And I think that was the first time that AWS had ever made a dedicated arm or products for front-end engineers. And it turned out to be a really good bet because AWS Amplify was one of the fastest growing AWS services, at least during the time that I was there. So I thought it was just really compelling to try it out and obviously everyone has very high regard for AWS. There's a bunch of services that I only experienced on the inside and I only learned about once I got on the inside, and I thought that was really interesting as well.

Shawn Wang: A few things I'll point out. I really loved the AWS interview process, actually. I felt like it was very rigorous and I definitely haven't had as rigorous a process anywhere else. And they really got a good look at every single part of me before they made the decision. And for...