New Directions
via Phil Windley, an article by Doug Kaye on architecting web applications with Amazon Web Services. Really fascinating stuff. I've been reading a bunch of random references to stuff like this. It seems like AWS is the new startup strategy. It's pretty brilliant, storage is a hard problem, and queueing is incredibly useful. EC2 sounds almost like black magic, but I guess I should look at it before passing judgement. I have a new New Year's resolution: you can't look into everything. Focus and concentrate your interests...
I started at a new job yesterday, with vrbo.com. I spent the day with a couple of developers, getting the tour of the system and getting a peek at the code. It was a good day; I'm really looking forward to getting set up today and digging into things. Things are really different here. There's no actual office. Everybody works from home, and pretty much all business is transacted via email, IM, or telephone. I'm definitely getting motivated to start finishing the basement.