Rex Morgan

Engineering leader, Builder Tools @ Amazon. Adventure partner of @cmorgan. I'm hiring! Opinions mine. He/him. [email protected]

[Rex Morgan @rexm]

There's no such thing as tech debt
A different, better way to convince your stakeholders to fund tech improvements:

https://t.co/wMK71YTr7t

[Rex Morgan @rexm]

I’ve been building on ECS Fargate since 2017. It’s the Fisher-Price My First Container Cluster for Toddlers - and that’s why it rocks. It is so simple it basically has one button on it that says “go” with a smily face on it you can press and get back to shipping customer value 💪

[Branko @brankopetric00]

Kubernetes migration almost killed our startup.

Where we were:
- 8 EC2 instances
- Ansible for deploys
- Boring but working
- $1200/month AWS bill

Why we migrated:
- New investor wanted 'cloud-native'
- Engineers wanted K8s experience
- Competitors were using it
- Seemed like the future

6 months later:
- 3 engineers spending full-time on K8s
- AWS bill at $4500/month
- Deploys took longer than before
- More outages, not fewer
- Product development stalled

We rolled back:
- Moved to ECS Fargate
- 2 week migration
- Back to $1800/month
- Engineers back on features

K8s is amazing for scale. We weren't at scale. Technology should solve problems you actually have.

[Rex Morgan @rexm]

I really need @IfBooksPod to do a follow-up explainer on how she does this.

[Will Sommer @willsommer]

Paramount is reportedly set to buy Bari Weiss’s Free Press for somewhere in the $100-$200 million range, with Weiss receiving a job guiding editorial direction at CBS News per @DylanByers reporting. https://t.co/Jqysl4tXLW

[Rex Morgan @rexm]

@palmerj3 @GergelyOrosz Hello, Amazonian here. PRFAQ is also the requirements doc. The internal teams building the thing own the vision expressed in the PRFAQ and continuously update it as they learn through the process of building. The code is the spec. High-agency, high-perf teams don’t need PRDs.

[Rex Morgan @rexm]

An alternate framing: if you’re at the top of the system you’re in, and the idea of making that system more open to others without removing you from the top makes you feel upset, maybe you’re just an asshole.

[david friedberg @friedberg]

i’d argue you’re too easily moved by the choice words. “privilege” and “equality” are selected because they confuse the notion of fairness. another way to frame his statement “if you’re accustomed to succeeding due to hard work, ingenuity, risk/sacrifice, and, sure, some amount of luck, having the outcomes reset so that everyone is rewarded more equally feels unfair.”

is succeeding after making good choices, sacrificing personally, and working hard really “privilege”?

is it oppressive that everyone doesn’t get to the same place?

perhaps the real oppression is the loss of individual liberties when naively egalitarian philosophies mutate into marxism, denying opportunities for individual sacrifice, effort, and achievement to be rewarded.

framed as privilege v equality misses the mark.. equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are v different things. silicon valley’s most successful are the immigrants who found america as one of the only places on earth where an individual with zero baseline privilege can struggle and sacrifice and effortfully succeed. calling them privileged after the fact seems hardly the point. but an easy one to make.

[Rex Morgan @rexm]

Right wingers often use that word “chaos” like it’s inherently bad. Not “crime”, not “hurt”, nothing that affects how people actually live. They fear chaos because they are weak and can’t cope in a complex society, cannot fathom one that is chaotic and leads to better outcomes.

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

BREAKING: The day after Mahmoud Khalil was released from an ICE detention facility, he is back to protesting outside of Columbia University.

What value does Mahmoud provide to America other than causing chaos?

[Rex Morgan @rexm]

My teams build the dev tools Amazon engineers use internally. We are _all_ using Sonnet hosted on Bedrock and loving all the cool stuff we can build with it!

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

Outside of Google is there any large company NOT using Sonnet as their primary model for coding?

Heard even Meta switched internally to it from Llama

Anthropic pulled off something pretty incredible by becoming the de facto coding model choice for most tech companies…

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

You can host Sonnet on AWS Bedrock and there are zero privacy concerns at all thanks to this setup.... it's what many companies do (and why this is great business for AWS!!)

Even Meta is no longer using finetuned Llama any more because non finetuned Sonnet is so much better and you can get full privacy (they do!)

[Rex Morgan @rexm]

2 things true at the same time:
1) our families are the best thing we have
2) dudes who police that for others are weird, creepy, and high on their own supply

[Rex Morgan @rexm]

Hank is a liar who parrots lines from country bumpkins who resent big cities without understanding how they work. He argues for taking away things like teachers and police who I pay for out of my own taxes.

[Hank Thomas @HankThomasDC]

@EJGoulet @HouseGOP It’s a needed detox from federal government funds. DC govt has gotten too big for a city. DC will just have to kill all of its wasteful programs and focus on what’s necessary starting with public safety…

[Rex Morgan @rexm]

It’s interesting when people experience a temporary loss of friction from changing political winds and think its existential vindication.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

The people who have accused everyone else of being the problem, are suddenly discovering that everyone else thinks THEY are the problem.

[Rex Morgan @rexm]

@Noahpinion “They work hard but denigrate the idea of hard work.” This is surprising to read. Can you elaborate?

[Rex Morgan @rexm]

@RightWingCope 100k guys who definitely do not have wives, or girlfriends. 100k incels fantasizing about what they’d do to the partner they will never have.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The Woke Mind Virus in graphical form.

It is very quantifiable.

Hey @jonstewart, why did you say at that dinner in Aspen that it’s fake?

And why did you advocate censorship?

[Rex Morgan @rexm]

Developers’ faces when they realize how unlikely it is that the effort to deliver the next most important thing for the customer always happens to take exactly the same amount of time, every time.

[Cory House @housecor]

Yep. A sprint is an arbitrary time box.

Sprints are like training wheels. Use if necessary at first, then try to quickly outgrow them.

[Rex Morgan @rexm]

This entire thread

[Allen Holub. https://linkedIn.com/in/allenholub @allenholub]

I can't think of a metric more worthless than "velocity." The typical definition (points/Sprint) is meaningless, given that nobody knows what a "point" is. If a point is a degree of difficulty/complexity, well, you don't know how difficult it really is until you build it. I've never heard of anybody assigning a point value after the code was written, but what exactly would be the point of that (so to speak 😄)? Any definition that just translates to output volume (e.g. LOC) is worthless because that doesn't consider the value of the work (to the business or the customer). If points are an indicator of time, then, given that you have the same amount of time in every Sprint, velocity will never vary. Add to all this that the system is easy to game ("Double my velocity? Sure! One point stories are now two points!") I'd just dump the whole concept.

[Major League Soccer @MLS]

GABRIEL PIRANI BRACE TO GIVE DC THE LEAD! 😱

[Rex Morgan @rexm]

The @Delta team have been phenomenal today. Operationally, Delta’s been a comedy of errors and I’m set to arrive 9 hours late. But Tino the gate agent at DCA, the cabin crew on my original flight, the staff at the DTW Sky Club staying open an extra hour! They’ve been awesome!

[Holy City Sinner @HolyCitySinner]

Six-term S.C. Republican Congressman Bob Inglis Endorses Kamala Harris https://t.co/vCGlzCqtgu

[Headquarters @HQNewsNow]

Interesting