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 to learn functional programming and that too on a language that seemed remotely similar to anything that I have done before. This was a kick ass project to get started on AWS. One thing I learnt from that experience ”Ask for what you want”
Over the years, my focus has been on tackling numerous challenging technical issues, such as building control plane for a distributed database from scratch, building a change log service that exposes all the writes done to the table through DynamoDB Streams, perform point in time backups and restores for a distributed database, build distributed transactions that work across partitions and tables, build global replication that provides data replicated across regions within seconds, and many problems of similar complexity. These projects demanded extensive contemplation, requiring dedicated attention throughout the day to truly understand the problems at hand. I learnt early on that to make meaningful contributions and offer valuable insights, it is essential to establish an environment conducive to deep engagement.
Whenever I attempted to solve multiple problems simultaneously, distractions tend to scatter my attention, making it challenging to concentrate fully on the task at hand or the people that I was interacting with. This ultimately leads to decreased productivity, compromised work quality, and, most importantly, missed opportunities for personal growth or making a substantial impact. Although there have been instances where I have juggled multiple tasks concurrently, I have often found myself dissatisfied, contrary to the anticipated happiness it was supposed to bring.
During a conversation with one of my mentors at Amazon, we talked about the notion of time passing swiftly over the decades. What caught my attention during that conversation was his intriguing observation that solving problems brings joy and triggers dopamine releases, whether it's for oneself or for team members. The process of tackling these challenges on a daily basis can be so absorbing and makes you feel good that time seems to fly by without us even noticing.
Life is fleeting, and it is essential not to squander our time on activities that fail to foster deep relationships or align with the problems we genuinely care about.
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