Well after 5 months working with Amazon, with surprisingly very good weather and having enough coffee that there is now a steady stream of caffeine running through my veins, my time had come to an end in Seattle. Working in a technology city had been a great experience, and you can tell it’s a technology city when you walk into the lobby of the downtown Sheraton Hotel and see in the lounge area a number of Microsoft Surface machines, playing the role of coffee tables, for you to play around with. No queues, no hoards of people surrounding the machines saying ‘wow’.........just 3-4 four machines lying there waiting for you to ‘touch’.
As from my previous blog (sleepless in seattle), written some 4-5 months ago or so, I mentioned I was working on Amazon’s new eCommerce offering called Amazon Enterprise Solutions (AES). AES is built on Java technology and makes use of services that are provided by Amazon’s core backbone systems. These services are exposed to the AES platform that are useful to building an eCommerce website, such services would be things like Shopping Carts, Checkout process, Wish Lists, Recommendations, Sign-In, etc, etc. AES platform doesn’t have to worry about any of the back end database side of things as this data is handled by Amazon’s core systems via service calls, which means as a developer/implementer of AES, we only need to worry about the application level. AES is made of up a number of packages/libraries (pagelets with corresponding layouts), these packages are the various components that you would use to build an eCommerce website, i.e. headers, navigation, breadcrumbs, personalization, search, etc, etc. Amazon has various in-house tools that are used to slot all these components together with ease. If there is a pagelet or a layout that doesn’t quit ‘do’ the job for a merchant/retailer then AES does allow for customisation of the code base as well. Working with the AES platform was a real pleasure for me and I’m sure Conchango will be there once it comes to the UK.
My role with Amazon was to use the platform to develop a website for one of Amazon’s clients whilst also helping build up the AES platform. That client was the UK company Mothercare. AES had come a long way in the 5 months that I was there and it made its first major internal release in October. There were 4 simultaneous projects going on within Amazon (developing different merchant websites) and Mothercare (www.mothercare.com) was the first to launch on this new platform, which was a major milestone for AES and a major success. Since then Mothercare has won the Online & Catalogue retailer of the year award at the Mother and Baby Awards 2008.
So what do I miss most about Seattle apart from the great work, the warm weather, the friendly people, the crazy Halloween parties, all the summer festivals, talking to a ‘Blue Angels’ US Navy fighter pilot (like our Red Arrows), playing the Wii in the office on Friday afternoons, the beautiful landscapes outside Seattle, the Seattle Mariners baseball game, the £/$ exchange rate (not anymore), the great seafood (especially the Alaskan salmon)..........................well it would have to be the FREE FILTERED COFFEE!
