When Hours Drag and Decades Dash
For more than the past decade, I've had the privilege of being an engineer on the DynamoDB team. Being part of this exceptional group of individuals dedicated to tackle highly ambiguous challenges. I joined the team as an engineer with limited knowledge of databases and none of NoSQL databases. The fact that I was novice intimidated me and excited me, as it meant I would constantly face challenges that would push me to expand my understanding. One particular instance that I vividly recall from my early days at AWS, was being welcomed into a room filled with three senior engineers talking about solving a scaling challenge in the replication protocol of SimpleDB. The details of the specific problem is explained in this article by AWS titled Summary of the Amazon SimpleDB service disruption . The opportunity to work on that project was solely due to my display of curiosity and eagerness to learn. The challenge was quite daunting because I had to ramp up on distributed systems, had t