tanchao's blog

About Me

My name is Chao Tan. I build platforms that are reliable and performant. I enjoy art, food, basketball, swimming and skiing.

I'm currently an engineer at Snowflake in Bellevue, where I work on data privacy and governance. Before that, I worked on Amazon Alexa owning APIs, services and 3P orchestration.

Links

@chaostan on Twitter

about tanchao, at the end of 2021 version

谭超, Tan Chao is the right sequence of my fullname.
Call me Chao though, or tc.

Who am I

believe in long term value and cultural strength
believe in “SDE = Somebody Do Everything”, not just an engineer but also a problem solver.
- believe in myself, confident to handle any problems; also know my limitation, and voice out if I’m there.
  - more specific, any probably limit to technically at this time.
believe in automation #automate.everything.
current interest is dynamic software system performance tuning, particularly the full-backend-stack, including clients, services, data store and its environment.

What I am looking for

I grew much faster when I was working with great people
Amazon taught me how importantly the culture matters, so I am looking for next company with its own culture
Business model determines fast vs normal lanes

What did I do

I coded since 2004 with B.S. in computer science; I actually programmed in my first job at 2008, which added debugging, testing and deploying; I named myself developer when I was in Singaore around 2010, when I started creating softwares beyond the job responsibility; I grew to a good engineer at eBay with a tech lead coaching me with the automation methodology at 2012; I became a senior engineer at HSBC after led a gloal distributed engineer pod.
I am more than a software engineer here at Amazon, “SDE” now wearing TPM/PM/TL/Mentor all different hats. We pay attention to customer experience and business model, own end to end outcome; I could measure, observe and reason really really really complicated systems (hundreds of services) and offer alternative solutions for different purpose under various constraints; I could focus on the mechanism, process and culture to ensure the tech team is with a good habit so that whole E.E. (engineering excellence) is efficient; I could own as much as I am motivated to, O.E. (operational excellece), product, feature, design, code review, code change and wikis, for example my recent favorite was the launch plan for new buddy.

What I am good at

keeping customer and business outcome first
watching over dynamic system end-to-end, including operational excellence
making right technical trade-offs (as best I can) and balance between delivery vs perfection
subject matter expert on some domains: developer platform, nearly realtime abnomaly detection and abuse prevention, micro-services, API design, Java Runtime
managing complex projects and/or dealing with complex situations: long running project, turn-red-to-green, plan-b etc.
leading engineer team via mechanism (coded or forced process), standards (normal process) and documentation
mastering production incident handling (ACL) and trouble shooting
staying foolish and hungry

What I am not good at

When I was emotional, probably 2-3 times in past 5 years, my ego increased during that period (around 1-2 months)
I am more likely drive straight forward communication when called open communication, with my constructive feedbacks, as I also value efficiency and it worked ok so far.

Why change?

I benefited a lot from Amazon’s culture and mechanisms, I believe there are many other great learnings from other great organizations; I’d like to explore.
- Suddenly, I felt ready to graduate from Amazon, I shall contribute my learnings and expertise to elsewhere.
Alexa grew from 500 to 10k ppl since I joint, the challenges are no longer scalability but maintanenbility around me.

Why now?

I kept my eye open and always ready for next rocket ship
I got my combo card recently and is waiting for my green card final process, eta. by May’22
- (I-485 submitted on Oct’20, I-140 approved in mid 2021)