I joined Amazon in 2009, when we were a 3000-engineer company, and got to experience its fast growth from 3k to 90k engineers over a 15-yr period. During that time, our engineering productivity needs had a number of interesting inflection points. A little toil here and there was a minor annoyance when we were 3k engineers but it became a much larger bottleneck when we were 10k, and things that didn’t matter with 10k engineers mattered greatly with 90k engineers. We had to continuously evolve the way we thought about our development practices as the company grew.

Having worked at Google as well exposed me to how some fundamentally different architectural decisions these companies made shaped the way they test and release software in significantly distinct ways. For example, Google chose to maintain a single shared monorepo where more than a hundred thousand engineers work with no branches, whereas Amazon chose an architecture with tens of thousands of independent microrepos. Both systems work at scale but require very different investments in engineering productivity, such as how test environments fit in the picture, and what kind of testing happens before and after submit.

Join me and learn about my journey as I saw Amazon grow by 30x!