Friday I turned in my Amazon badge. It feels like the end of an era that in this post I want to remember.

I interviewed at a hotel in Guadalajara –the interviewing team had all flown in as it was cheaper than flying everyone out to Seattle for the loop–. I had 4 interviews, 2 of which I remember the most: "Design a LRU cache" –which I killed– & "Design a predictive text algorithm" (something for which one must use a trie) –which I fumbled–. I thought I had done alright. 2h later I was having lunch with my team at Onelogin when I received a text from the recruiter: "Congrats, we're making you an offer". I called my then-girlfriend-now-wife about it – neither of us could grasp what was about to occur.

The actual offer eventually came through. We got married, we both quit our jobs, submitted all the necessary paperwork, and waited waited waited for the visa to come through. The wait lasted a couple of months – we got married on 6/26, but I didn't start until 8/21 –in hindsight, we could have waited a little bit more before quitting our jobs–. We got 1st class plane tickets –it made sense if only for all the extra bags, and the mimosas couldn't hurt–, and one day we hopped on a plane, said our goodbyes, and moved.

Relocating this time was different from the time I relocated in my early 20s. This time I had my wife to share my excitement with: We are moving! All the places we are going to go! All the things we are going to see! Besides, having moved before felt at times like cheating –e.g. I had from day zero a SSN, which implies having credit history, which in turn implies that renting an apartment wasn't the miserable experience it had been the prev time–.

Coming up to my first day I had so many questions. How does a FAANG look like from the inside? What kind of computer will I get? Where's the code stored? Do they use GitHub, or something else? What other tools do they use? Hopefully their CI/CD processes look good, and so on. My first day I showed up at a building named "Arizona", in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood. The place was packed. The "employment verification line" was an actual line! I got my computer and a backpack –which probably is stashed in my garage– and listened to stories on how Amazon is Earth's most customer centric company. After the session was over there was a "meet your manager" event. How was I even supposed to even recognize my manager, let alone meet him?! We figured it out somehow, and had company-sponsored lunch at a Thai place –everything company-sponsored tastes better– and walked to our building in 5th Ave.

My first days I dived deep into it all. Here's the code, here's how you run it, here's how you run the integ tests, and look at this other service that handles auth. Some data is being pulled from S3 and in-mem cached but there is a 2nd layer of caching which doesn't make sense. I would eventually refactor all of it and make it my own, earning my team's trust along the way. Those were the good old days.

Anyhow, I'm so grateful to everyone that made it possible. First and foremost, to my wife, which continues journeying with me, and whose support has made pretty much everything possible. My 3 teams –Go, Alexa, Brand Shopping–, I thank them all for the opportunities, the cool projects, and the bad ones, too, for I learned from all of them! I want to thank all the teammates that mentored me & those who allowed me to mentor them. I may miss some names and Idk if I have them all as connections on LI, but these I write from memory: Yating, Chengwen, Jessica, Amandeep, Debakar, Mira, Jason, Ramanand, Tushar –they all welcomed me and somehow explained me what brazil was–. Preethi & Vismay –who met me in a dip but of whom I have fond memories–. Aldo, Pedro, Franklyn, Lingyao, Ricardo –who gave me the opportunity at the Brand Shopping team–. Special shoutout to Franklyn, whose candid feedback put some screws in me in place. Shuizhou, Kaustubh –I'll really miss you guys–. Andrew A, Steve C, Alex D, Piragash, Matt McBride, Swap, Prashant –y'all were a true inspiration–. Xiaojing, Vibhor, Chris, Srinnath –with whom I shared the end–. I thank you all.

Well, that's it fellas. I'll see you on the other side.