Hey guys. Man, this list brings back memories. Are Ben and Brian still around?
I graduated from UMD in 2004 with a BS in Computer Science. Since then, I went to grad school, and thereafter joined Amazon.com as a Software Development Engineer. Amazon.com is looking into doing more recruiting (up from its current level of 0) at University of Maryland for software developers, systems engineers, and other technical roles. As part of this, myself and some other guys will be doing a Tech Talk on 10/2 in CSIC 1115 (I'll send out precise times as the date approaches). The topic will be centered around the backend systems that power the Amazon.com family of web sites. When I was in school, I thought working at Amazon would be the quintessential web monkey job. That I'd spend my days churning out HTML and Javascript. But really, nothing could be further from the truth. Amazon is one huge distributed system, with a ton of open source technologies under the cover (Linux, Apache, ...). We're now in the process of making all the highly scalable internal technology available to the outside world via web services (e.g. EC2, S3, SDB). During the course of my short career, I've written web services in C++, Apache modules in C, and many (maybe too many) Perl glue scripts. Anyway, I can't promise anything Linux-specific in the talk. But if the profile of this group is anything like it was 8 years ago, people should find it very interesting. Cheers, Dave
