By day I'm a Performance Engineer for Amazon.com, Earth's Largest Selection, or Earth's most Customer-Friendly company, or both. We collect huge amounts of data representing the state of Amazon's web site, how many orders are taking place, which search results are useful to people, etc. It's my job, along with some other great people's, to collect all this data (which in and of itself is a tough problem), store it in some useful form, and then provide tools that make it easy for other programmers and to examine the state of Amazon.com's day-to-day (or even minute-to-minute) operations. I am generally drinking the Kool-Aid at Amazon -- I think it's an awesome place to work, has a great location, lots of fun people, and a healthy attitude about how to run a company.
Note that because I work there I'm very careful not to talk about any specifics as to what goes on within Amazon. I'm also certainly prohibited from offering any speculation on news relating to Amazon (like, say, if I think the purchase of company XYZ made sense or not) lest I accidentally commit fourteen forms of securities fraud and get fired. Which is a shame, because I'd want to point out all sorts of cool things that happen on the Web Site. I wish I could. It would behoove Amazon to come up with some sort of blogging policy, so that folks within the company who have things they want to share have the chance. There's got to be someone with all sorts of bottled up interesting stories like the Raymond Chen over at The Old New Thing; it's a shame they don't get to share them with the rest of the world.
In my past life I spent a year and a half working at Microsoft. It's a good company, but I just didn't fit into my group very well at all, and I found a lot of things about the company very off-putting to me personally. But this should not reflect poorly on MS; there are lots of people I know who are very happy there, and not just because it's a stable job -- some of them have interesting projects to work on and dive headfirst into their work.
After leaving MS I spent a few months volunteering for Alex Alben's (D-WA8) Congressional Campaign. Political volunteering is one of those things everyone ought to do once, just as a matter of citizenship.
Before moving to Seattle I was a workaholic student, TA, and system administrator at Brown University, a school I initially found off-putting but grew to love. It's certainly a much better place to spend 4 years than UMass-Cambridge, New Haven State University, SUNY-Harlem, SUNY-Ithaca, South Nowhere New Jersey, or Even More Nowhere New Hampshire. While at Brown I was Head TA for CS32 during a two year span where we drastically reduced the drop-out rate, even after the tech bubble collapsed. I was also on our ACM contest programming team which placed second in our sectional preliminary (behind MIT) despite showing up late. I think one of our team members was hung over too but I'm not sure. While you can't take a "minor" at Brown, I effectively minored in Religious Studies to go along with my Math-Computer Science joint major concentration.
Other odds and ends:
I used to go by "Nick Beaudrot", but have been slowly migrating towards "Nicholas". Most online documents you see that reference "Nick Beaudrot" are in fact referring to me; I don't have an evil twin out there on the internet.
You can peruse my Amazon.com Wish List and get me a trinket if you're feeling generous. If you want to surprise me, feel free to Browse items that appear in the "similar items" section for items on my Wish List.
Based on Myers-Briggs, I'm an ENFP. The E is very slight, the N and F are moderate, and the P is heavy. Though, I sometimes think the distance between personality tests and horoscopes is not particularly far.
I currently run the local chapter of Drinking Liberally. You can meet us at the Montlake Ale House on Tuesdays any time after 8:00. The first Tuesday of every month is "speaker night", where we invite local activists, authors, and politicians to come in just to chat. On non-speaker nights we talk politics, but tend to avoid any sort of direct activist talk; if you want that sort of thing go check out DFA.
During the winter I'm on the slopes quite often. As a Southerner I always thought snow sports were an absurdly snobby activity, since being a skier in Atlanta meant you had to fly to either Colorado or the Northeast, or drive eight hours to crappy conditions in North Carolina or West Virginia. But now that I'm here in the Subaru Outback capital of the world, it turns out to be a pretty laid back thing to do. Yes, the barrier to entry is much higher than it is for, say, basketball. But there are plenty of every day folks who don't have six figure salaries who are out on the mountain with their kids. And believe it or not, snowboarding is fun!
I have pet chinchillas. They're cuter and smarter than the hamster/gerbil/guinea pig/rat family of animals (well, rats are smarter) but not allergy-inducing the way cats, dogs, and rabbits are. And getting a ferret would have been too ... goth.
I think Social Software is a fascinating concept. A decent chunk of the software in that space is meat-market personals stuff, which isn't very exciting. But that's only about 10% of the software out there, and it's the other 90% (including non-meat-market personals) that I find interesting.
My father, who has obviously failed to raise his son properly, has voted for the Republican Presidential candidate since voting for Carter in 1980 -- which is impressive, since I'm not even sure I would have voted for Carter in 1980. He's a highly respected Corporate tax and general corporate lawyer back home in Atlanta. I have no rational explanation for how I turned out the way I did. Interestingly we agree that current policy does not do enough to promote energy conservation, that in certain instances the US regulatory regime is too heavy (though I think it's closer to the right weight than he does), and that Roe v. Wade is a very poor decision, as a matter of law. He also writes excellent church music. You can buy his CD at Amazon.com and help us both out.
I'm just kidding dad, I think I turned out fine and you did a good job. I love you too.
My mom does not yet have a web presence, but does have the same name as a furniture store, which has resulted in many wrong number calls.
My sister is going to grow up to be the next Jane Goodall, and will be in Costa Rica for a year working with primate biologists. She also has no web presence at the time being.
By day I'm a Performance Engineer for Amazon.com, Earth's Largest Selection, or Earth's most Customer-Friendly company, or both. We collect huge amounts of data representing the state of Amazon's web site, how many orders are taking place, which search results are useful to people, etc. It's my job, along with some other great people's, to collect all this data (which in and of itself is a tough problem), store it in some useful form, and then provide tools that make it easy for other programmers and to examine the state of Amazon.com's day-to-day (or even minute-to-minute) operations. I am generally drinking the Kool-Aid at Amazon -- I think it's an awesome place to work, has a great location, lots of fun people, and a healthy attitude about how to run a company.
