If you've been following my adventures, you'll know I've been doing startups for years, and this last year has been no different. I've treated these last 11 months like a startup (studying full-time to build my skills to be more marketable), with the goal of getting acquired (in this case hired) by a large company.

As you may know, the last 11 months have been very difficult for me. As a self-taught web developer of 15 years, my computer science study plan had taken me months to get through, and more months of practicing for the whiteboard interview. The main motivator was to start a new career as a software engineer.

Well, I reached out to my network, and made a lot of new friends, and got connected with every tech giant in the Pacific northwest. Of all of them, Amazon stood out as the most innovative company over the last 10 years. I applied via a referral, whom I had met at a startup event in 2013, and got the process rolling.

After so many months of non-stop effort, sacrifice, and worry, I’m pleased to announce that I finally made it!

Today I accepted an offer to be a Software Development Engineer at Amazon.com.

Working at Amazon is a dream come true and I'll be working on the Amazon Web Services Config team. I've wanted to work on AWS for years. I've been using AWS since 2012, when I got started using CloudFormation to automate infrastructure build-out and scaling.

AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides operations teams with AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance. Config Rules enables administrators to create rules that automatically check the configuration of AWS resources recorded by AWS Config, as well as define actions AWS can take to fix issues automatically.

Here's a video with some cool automation tricks you can do with AWS Config Rules, CloudTrail, and Lambda: