Datta Vellal

2016

Joined Amazon in February as an individual contributor on the catalog ingestion team, made feed migration a self-service procedure that 29 providers moved onto without developer help, and owned the team's move of 57 hosts to Amazon Linux. Also backfilled about 2 billion catalog records, won the catalog org's global hackathon and started teaching Scrum to other engineers as a volunteer trainer.

  • 29feed providers self-service
  • ~2Bcatalog records backfilled
  • 57hosts migrated
  • 1stof 45 hackathon teams
  • 4sessions

What mattered most

  1. 01

    Trained 31 more engineers in Scrum and lifted my score to 4.47/5

    Three weeks after my first Scrum workshop, I used that cohort's feedback, taught 31 more engineers and saw my presenter score rise from 4.12 to 4.47.

  2. 02

    Owned the team's move of 57 hosts to Amazon Linux

    I owned the team's migration off an end-of-life operating system across 57 hosts, 22 environments and 9 pipelines, kept the feeds org informed on one tracking page, and closed the policy violation and its open tickets.

  3. 03

    Won 1st of 45 teams at a global catalog hackathon

    Our four-person team won the catalog organization's 2016 hackathon with a way to use customer feedback on product pages to improve catalog data.

  4. 04

    Built the data pipeline behind the catalog value reports, about 2 billion records

    To measure how much of the catalog came from automated feed parsing, I built a tool that pulled catalog search results, split them and loaded them into the data warehouse, back to 1970 across 12 marketplaces.

  5. 05

    Turned catalog feed migration into a self-service procedure used for 29 providers

    I built a consistent XML-to-JSON parser, wrote the migration procedure with the support team and took myself out of the approval path; 29 feed providers moved onto it without a developer involved.

“TL;DR The new parser implementation rocks and code is more readable and easy to understand !!”

Application Engineer, catalog support teamAmazon, May 2016Read the capsule

By month

Also in 2016

  1. 25 November 2016Taught my first Scrum workshop to 28 engineers as a volunteer trainer, presenter score 4.12 out of 5Talk
  2. 8 March 2016Moved a feed-history database to AWS RDS and documented a one-day method a UK colleague asked to reuseProject
  3. 15 February 2016Joined Amazon India as Software Development Engineer II and built the catalog team's onboarding repositoryRole
  4. 2016Taught 4 sessions in 2016 to about 219 people: 2 college seminars and 2 Scrum workshopsTalk