• “Ability to lead change and drive own initiatives…“
• “Eye for design…“
• “Cross-team skills…“

I hate to break it to you, but even if you do all these things, you’re not going to get hired. Simply put, hiring by the job description is a great recipe for hiring mediocre people. Instead, I like to hire outside the job description. Tell me about a time when you went above and beyond your role. What do you do at your job that’s not your job? Give me an example of a project that started off as an incubation and changed the way your team does things.

I’ve found that otherwise smart people looking for a ‘home’ can’t answer these questions. They’re looking for structure and stability.

Interestingly, makers and hackers do great at these questions. They are often people who go above and beyond their day jobs. They build prototypes. They learn about Go and Erlang even though they code in C#. They take risks and do anything to make their team and product successful.

I want to work with these people.

According to conventional wisdom at big software firms (ahem Microsoft cough cough), users like ‘easy’ setup. A few clicks. A couple of questions. A progress bar. Boom! So, I should have given up hours ago. This sort of thinking permeates the culture at big firms. Designers and program managers deplore ‘long, complicated setup steps’ and try to remove every click possible from a signup or setup workflow. I can’t tell you about the number of meetings I have sat through where people have argued over a single form field.

As a principle, removing steps is a good thing. If you have web app, for the sake of everything holy, please remove as many steps as possible from your conversion funnel. Bravo! Go fight the good fight! But be careful and keep these tips in mind along the way:

• Desirability > simplicity. Simply put, nobody cares about one-click setup if they actual product is not desirable. That one hour of development time you spend removing a field in the signup form could be spent making the core product awesome. Users are also more forgiving for desirable products — it’s a little bit like how parents yell less at a favorite child. It’s a dirty secret, but it’s true. Before you make setup easier, ask yourself if you can invest that time in the core product.

• Designer, know thy audience. Different user segments have varying levels of tolerance for complexity. Consumers are probably the least tolerant of errors and questions, but developers … ah … now here’s a bunch will bash away at a problem until they are blue in the face. Is it nice that Visual Web Developer 2012 has a one-click install? Super! Would students still download it if it took, say, 5 minutes to configure? Sure!

• Documentation helps – a lot! Documentation, especially for installation and configuration, is amazing. Clear docs with steps for major operating systems will go a long way towards making your product palatable to developers. Keep them up to date as Apple tends to break things with each major release (like pulling X11 out of Mountain Lion).

Let’s go back a couple of generations to the 1950s. People in that generation held a steady job, married one person (usually for life), and saved diligently. They also generally had a small, steady group of friends they maintained relationships with, usually for life. If you worked hard, saved, and did right by society, society did right by you. This is what a passively-managed portfolio of securities that tracks a market index looks like – play by the market’s rules, and get the market’s returns. If the market wins, you win.

Compare that to the lives of 30-somethings today:

Our careers have to be actively managed. Most of the people I work with are regularly courted by recruiters. Many people interview once a year. Yes, coffee with a buddy at a startup counts as recruiting. Friends in the finance industry also recruit actively. The returns to those who actively manage their careers are high – more career options, better negotiating positions in your current gig, and so on. Those who don’t have this luxury (i.e. are not in finance, tech or healthcare) are still expected to do this legwork by employers, even if their options are far more limited.

Our close relationships have to be actively managed Whut? Consider the divorce rate in the USA, which has been rising steadily for factors that are beyond this article. I would argue that even marriages have to be actively managed – in fact, there’s a small industry serving just this function with marriage counseling, therapy, and even pre-canna classes. Couples have started realizing that it’s not just enough to be reactive – you have to be proactive in your personal relationships.

Our personal finances have to be actively managed. You can no longer hope for a successful retirement if you have “merely” worked hard and saved your entire life. Have you accounted for healthcare costs? One of the top contributors to bankruptcy in the US is healthcare costs. Have you accounted for divorce, one of the great reducers of personal wealth (see above)? What about college costs, which are rising at a frightening clip. With so many variables at play, a passive financial portfolio has little chance of being successful.

So where does this leave us? Is active management of your entire life a good thing? There is, after all, something distinctly American about requiring individuals to take charge of their own destinies. Pick up a self-help book for crying out loud!

Unfortunately, I believe that most people are unwilling or unable to sort the signal from the noise when they are asked to tackle so many different aspects of their lives. It seems something is broken in our social contract when everyone is responsible for everything…

Here are some key lessons I took away from this case study:

1. Successful businesses listen to internal and external customers. In this case, Amazon leadership listened to internal customers and realized that tens of internal teams were reinventing the wheel every year. Another example: after opening their platform to affiliates in the early 2000′s, Amazon leaders were struck by the positive response among developers. They decided rather quickly to add more fuel to the fire. AWS’ growth owes much to Amazon’s ability to listen to customers.

2. Don’t lose sight of your company’s mission Amazon launched AWS to create a differentiated, cash-flow positive business. Amazon’s gross margin on AWS is way higher than its margin on e-retail. However, this has not kept it from consistently lowering costs every quarter. AWS price drops, in fact AWS’ mission to make the cloud ever-cheaper, aligns well with Amazon’s overall mission to bring ever more affordable products to users. Giving up fat margin’s today (which would make Amazon look great in front of investors!) for long-term growth and market dominance takes admirable foresight.

3. Test, measure, adjust I was struck by the number of times Andy Jassy mentioned that they put the gas on an initiative after a test.

4. Run it like a business. Jassy mentioned time and again how he kept an eye on the bottom line, and ran AWS not as an incubation or startup but as a long term business. Features were developed not because they were cool, but because they contributed to the bottom line, if not today then at a measurable date in the future.

Overall, a good read. I highly recommend it if you can get access

x = 5
x = x + 1

and you want to add a breakpoint, you typically do something like this:

x = 5
import ipdb; ipd.set_trace()
x = x +1

Now when you run this script, as long as you have ipdb installed, you will be able to start debugging in your Python interpreter. Adding this text can quickly become tedious in Sublime. Here’s a quick trick to enter this breakpoint:

1. Click Tools > New Snippet

2. Save the following as /User/breakpoint.sublime-snippet

	
	ipdb
	source.python

Now, when you type ipdb you can tab-complete to enter this text.

First, here’s why we are making changes to the format:

• Difficult to understand. We have heard from users that the current CSV format is difficult to understand. For example, we pack several values in the ResourceDescription field like this: ^Storage^Geo Redundant^^Storage (GB/month)^AzureStorage^GB/month. We worked hard to make the new CSV file much easier to read, making field names more intuitive and expanding packed fields.
• Not enough detail. The current CSV file does not have important details – for example, it tells you how much of a resource you consumed but not how much you are being billed for. Similarly, it does not tell you what rate you are paying for each resource. These details are now in the new CSV file. Moreover, the CSV now has a breakdown of daily usage as well.
• Does not match your invoice. The existing CSV is generated using a different API than the one that generates your bill. So, in some cases, it’s possible to see different usage numbers on your CSV and your bill. We now use the same API in both places, so your CSV should match what you see on your bill.

You can download a sample of the new CSV file to check it out. Here are some fields that won’t be immediately useful to users, but are handy if you call Azure Support:

• Subscription ID: The same ID that shows up in Account when you click on a subscription.
• Order ID: An internal ID that is used by Azure Support
• Offer Name: An internal ID that is used by Azure Support
• Subs Extra Status: An internal ID that is used by Azure Support
• SKU: An internal ID used by Azure
• ResourceGuid: An internal ID used by Azure

• Amazing (up to 32%) discounts on Azure with new Prepaid Plans. Steven Martin covers the plans really well in his “Taking the fear out of commitment” blog post, but here’s the gist: by paying for Azure ahead of time, you get up to a 32% discount compared to Pay-as-you-go prices. You have a good degree of freedom in when and how you pay: you can pay up-front or every month, and you can prepay for 6 months or 1 year. The minimum amount required to get a discount is $500. Also, if you exceed the prepaid amount, you simply pay Pay-as-you-go rates on overage. So if you are spending a well-known amount of Azure, switch to a prepaid plan and start saving.
• Better error messages during signup: I know, I know, really? But trust me, nothing sucks more than getting this generic “Oops!” message when you’re trying to sign up for Azure:

Now, we show a much more detailed error message with a decent explanation of what went wrong, and next steps. For example, here’s what shows up if you try to sign up for MSDN benefits on Azure more than once:

• Simpler usage history. Based on popular feedback, we got rid of the “Show common usage vs. show all usage” dropdown. Now you see your usage in a single view.
• Signup performance improvements: We made signup much, much faster.

Happy building!

For corporations, organizational accounts have several key benefits:

• Employees do not have to sign in with ‘personal’ accounts e.g. with their Microsoft account. You can cleanly separate personal assets from organizational assets.
• If an employee leaves the company, the employer can revoke their account without having to call Microsoft support.
• If you have set up federated authentication with Microsoft (e.g. using Active Directory dirsync), your users can log in using their domain credentials! This is really powerful, because you remain the sole owner of your users’ identities.
• If you have signed up for Office 365, you can login using the same credentials.
• Last but not least, users can now login using two-factor authentication such as a smartcard.

1. As of today, you can purchase Azure in several new countries: Russia, Uruguay, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Turkey and Ukraine.

2. We have localized our Account Portal in Turkish and Polish: Hoş Geldiniz and Witamy to our new friends!

3. We have introduced a feature that I am personally very excited about – historical usage charts for every billable service on Azure. To check them out, go to the Account Portal, click on a subscription and click the little graph icon – usage charts are great for giving you a glimpse of usage patterns. What’s great about usage charts is that they break ‘rolled up’ meters like storage into separate meters. In the picture below, I can see that I have used 1.5 GB of geo-redundant storage, but no locally redundant storage (which is cheaper).

1. Signup for Preview Features

The Azure team is working on tons of new features, and we will be giving users early access to them before they are released to production. To get access to these features, log into your account and click Preview Features. As of this writing, the only preview available is for Media Services. When you sign up for a preview, your request is queued and is usually processed within a few days. You will get a confirmation email as soon as you are approved (unfortunately we don’t send a confirmation email when you apply for access).

On a side note – go check out Media Services if you are remotely interested in encoding and processing videos. It is a mind-blowingly awesome product which makes it almost fun – almost – to do video processing online.

2. Historical usage downloadable as a CSV file

We have long given users the ability to download usage as a CSV file so they can do their own analytics in a spreadsheet program like Excel. We just added the ability to download historical usage over periods of time longer than the current billing period – so now you can go six months in the past and get historical data. Get your number crunching on!

3. Subscription ID matches the one in the Management Portal

This is a small ‘feature’, but it is one of my pet peeves. Now we show the same subscription ID in the Billing Portal as we show in the Management Portal. Duh, right?