Amazon Development Center India

2005-04-21T05:33:00.000-07:00

It's been long time since we've been here.
Since then we've been busy having fun, working hard and making history.

We must say goodbye to good ol' blogspot as we move to our own blog site:
http://india.amazon.com/blog.

Catch up on more action there!

The Great Automatic Grammatizator

2005-03-13T23:39:00.000-08:00

“Blossoms, Church street,” said Mr. Murthy from The Select Bookstore. That is where you may find the original versions of the Amar Chitra Kathas and Indrajal Comics.

I came to Bangalore a few months ago from Seattle and I wanted to buy the books of my childhood for my 5 year old Aman. Blossoms had a good collection of these and more – Amar Chitra Kathas, Indrajal, Tinkle, Target, Enid Blyton, ...I picked my red shopping basket, collecting the best of these… reminiscing through my younger days.

The children’s’ section had a great collection. I bought two of my all time favorites - James and the Giant peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Raold Dahl. I stumbled upon Boy: Tales of childhood by Dahl. I hadn’t read this one before. It was a book inviting readers into the younger days of Dahl. This one was for me! And this one too – The Great Automatic Grammatizator and other stories by the same author. I came out of Blossoms looking like an ancient library. I was happy with my investment.

The Great Automatic Grammatizator is a precious story. . Set in a time when the great mathematical engine was being built. This Classic is a story of a young aspiring writer who builds a story- writing machine. A machine which can, at the click of pre-selector buttons conjure stories with anything one would want in it. Satirical, Power, Mystery, Profundity…anything!

Of course I could arrange my little story brilliantly with a little help :-) I searched for the Grammatizator on Amazon.com. Apart for the book, I got a message that read : Refine your search: Find grammatizator in these categories:. I searched on A9.com. and it pointed me to the book. I tried searching Google, just in case…Same results..

I guess Dahl’s story was an idea ahead of his time and ours too - In the time of great online search engines, the Grammatizator is yet to happen.

Building Blocks of Innovation

2005-01-16T01:37:00.000-08:00

Amazon’s development center in India is all about innovation. Everything we are involved in is focused on innovating in the space we are in. We are focused on some of the biggest game-changing initiatives in extremely competitive areas where innovation is the key to success and the environment that we work plays an important role in getting us in the ‘zone’ [1].

Innovation is a tricky thing. Creativity can never be forced. That creativity needs a free mind and an environment that encourages new ideas is an obvious and almost an overstated fact [2]. However, this is something that we are passionate about. We like to exercise our creativity (More about our internal Creative Expression contest soon), surround ourselves with things that challenge our brain cells and at the same time open our eyes to innovation in other places. We also recognize the role of natural light in creating healthy thinking spaces [3] and we have plenty of it.

Our space provides us with the ability to create thinking spaces almost anywhere (epiphanies are not planned). The environment reflects our passion for building blocks enabling innovation and keeping them simple. It allows us to innovate ourselves and at the same time enable others to innovate in ways we never imagined.

We want our work environment to exemplify our philosophies and culture and provide our teams of innovators, builders and owners an environment fostering creativity. It is clearly day 1 and our quest is a creative experience in itself that each of us in Bangalore is a significant participant in.

[1] "Where do these people get their (unoriginal) ideas?" Joel-on-software.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html

[2] "Innovative Space Exploration: Designing your optimal creative Environment" by Jonathan Vehar at http://www.thinksmart.com/2/articles/idealenvironment.html

[3] "The Role of Light in health" at http://www.sumeria.net/health/light.html

Jason Levitt on the Amazon Queue Service

2005-01-05T22:05:00.000-08:00

Long-time Amazon Web Services (AWS) developer and author Jason Levitt just put out an article that describes the Simple Queue Service (SQS) and talks about building a chat application using it.

Check it out at http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2005/01/05/sqs.html.

Do you have an interesting application that can use SQS? Do you have an idea for improving SQS? Do you have an ideas for other useful web services that can help you innovate? Let us know by sending email to jobs-bangalore@amazon.com.

Donate to the Tsunami Disaster Relief Efforts

2004-12-30T07:42:00.000-08:00

All of us at Amazon.com are deeply saddened by the loss of lives resulting from the South Asia earthquake and tsunamis on December 26. We are offering customers the ability to make donations directly to the American Red Cross to aid the evacuation of surviviors and the dispersal of first aid. One hundred percent of your donation will go to the American Red Cross. We are glad that our technology can be used for this noble cause.

You can donate now with 1-click on http://www.amazon.com.

Thank you in advance for making any donation to help in this time of great need.

Research Pubs from Amazon India

2004-11-04T01:11:00.000-08:00

Algorithms for Single Link Failure Recovery

and Related Problems



Amit M Bhosle, Teofilo F Gonzalez

Journal of Graph Algorithms & Applications (to appear)



We investigate the single link failure recovery

problems which deal with rerouting issues in networks

prone to link failure. Furthermore, the knowledge

of the link failure is not propagated across the

network, and the failure is discovered only when one

is about to use the failed link. We present near

optimal algorithms for arbitrarily weighted undirected

graphs, and achive an improved algorithm for

unweighted (undirected) graphs, and integer-edge-

weighted (undirected) graphs. For directed graphs,

we present a super-linear lower bound for the problem.

Finally, we extend our techniques to devise a near-optimal

algorithm for the k minimum weight replacement edges for

the tree edges of a minimum-spanning-tree.

[PDF] [Bibtex]

First Just Do it for India!

2004-10-23T05:03:00.000-07:00

The Just Do It Award recognizes and rewards employees who exemplify two of our core values: innovation and bias for action. To receive a Just Do It award, nominees must try something on their own initiative; in other words, they're not following orders or waiting for and obtaining approval. To avoid encouraging associates to just go out and do anything an important corollary to this award is that nominees think through the ramifications of their efforts well. The nominees' efforts solve a problem, fill a significant customer or business need, or take advantage of an opportunity. Importantly, nominees' efforts do NOT have to work out to be considered; it is their bias for action that is being rewarded. Finally, the effort may be related to their regular job, but the winner's efforts typically are outside, above, or beyond simply doing their regular job really well.

Vivek was awarded the first Just Do It for Amazon India. It was scrambleto get a Nike shoe (Nike = Just Do it! in case you are wondering) of size 14 (Just Do It winners have big shoes to fill) but we did manage to buy one just in time and got everyone in the office to sign it.

More about Vivek's accomplishment ...
As the Bangalore development center started hiring developers in August, one of the key challenges was to provide reliable network connectivity and basicdevelopment environment for the developers to be productive from day one. Efforts to recruit a bar-raising system administrator were under way, but to no effect. Vivek, who is also the first external SDE to be hired into the Bangalore team, saw the state of affairs and volunteered to improve the infrastructure. He setup a basic local area network (using his personal home router), liaised with the local ISP, built a central Linux server for development, helped setup individual workstations, installed productivity tools such as twiki, manageduser administration and e-mail accounts, handled security and virus issues, and acted as the go-to guy for all infrastructure issues. Amazingly, Vivek didall of this while developing key software components as part of his pizza team. Vivek’s ownership and initiative, in setting up and maintaining the development infrastructure, were invaluable to improved productivity at the Bangaloredev center.

Congratulations Vivek!

Architects of Amazon India

2004-10-23T04:58:00.000-07:00

2 Pizza Teams at Amazon are composed of super-stars who are not only technically good but also carry a smart business head. Well, we have take it a step further inBangalore. Over the last 2-3 weeks, we had some good sessions to come up with theplans for our new office. It was fun to incorporate the core competencies of Amazon into our work environment. We will have a space free of hierarchy and open communication,a place that would underscore customer obsession, innovation, teamwork, passion for solving tough problems, frugality and having fun at the same time.

It was also fun wearing the systems hat and working as a team to get our development environment in better shape - configuring routers, VPNs, boxes, network, evaluating open source ...

Indeed day 1 and a honor to be a part of this super-star team of builders!

In search of Smart, Talented, Software Development Engineers

2004-09-25T21:00:00.000-07:00

We are looking for smart, talented, independent, and experienced software development engineers.

Successful candidates will have 2-50 years of software engineering and product delivery experience, with strong background in algorithms and high performance distributed systems. Experience in search software is a plus, but not a requirement. Candidates must have a proven ability to design reliable, maintainable code in C/C++, Java and a firm understanding of UNIX, Web technologies, and application programming.

Candidates must be innovative, flexible, and self-directed; they should be passionate about what they do; they should show a willingness to share, discuss, and brainstorm ideas; they should strive to invent and implement new software products that help people. A graduate degree in computer science or related fields, or equivalent experience, is required.

We offer an open dynamic work environment, competitive benefits, and all the excitement that comes from doing something new and being there right from the beginning. If you love to be independent, with long term goals, working on your own creations, pushing the envelope. You will be rewarded by seeing your creations used by tens of millions of people.

If you or someone you know are interested to learn more about these opportunities, please drop in a mail to jobs-bangalore@amazon.com, and we'll take it from there.

Design Patterns

2004-09-23T13:22:00.000-07:00

The Race Course office interiors are ready for a design.We are looking for ideas and designs that mirror the essence of us Amazonians. Inspiring. Innovative. Frugal yet functional. Simple, yet stylish.Door Desks. Seamless meeting spaces. Whiteboards – on tabletops, whiteboards in the elevators. Individuals in teamrooms. Timelines. Open spaces. Open to ideas….

Would love to hear from you….

Blogging 101

2004-09-23T13:19:00.000-07:00

Wanted to write more…. But then the devil IS in the details. Is this blog for internal and external audiences to read? What should I write about? What theme would we have? Our work culture? Technology? Our products? Product releases? Will my blog have some structure? Definition? Should it? Should there be rules? Should someone monitor for the content? Can we have guest bloggers....

Hey, but that’s against the spirit of blogging right? Blogs are for people who love to write. Free spirits who believe in the freedom of expression. Why the boundaries? Protocols? Blogettiquette?

We still have to decide. Maybe it will take time, maybe it won’t. Or, maybe there is a much simpler way of doing this. We’ll figure it out…slowly, but surely. Till then, I’ll let the words flow….

Hello World!

2004-09-23T13:15:00.000-07:00

Vivek, Lalitha, Ruchi, Pari, Anand, Bharat, Kapil, Amit, Amol, Vijayashree, Rupa. Put all of us in 3 office cubes; add the laptops, minus the VPN’s (all but one waiting to be reflashed), multiply the chaos, divide the challenge – and - what you get is our stellar India Development Center Team…all in the process of working hard…having fun…making history!

Wonder what are we all working hard at? Our two self contained business divisions here will focus on solving extremely challenging technical problems in areas of Search, Information Retrieval, Security, Distributed Systems and Secure Transaction Processing....and more!

Well, stay tuned to this blogspot to get to know us folks better!