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From Degree to Day Job

Tom Paulus
December 02, 2021

From Degree to Day Job

How did I end up with my Job at Amazon and what does it take to get in the door.

This talk covers both my journey to Amazon, as well as goes over one of my favorite interview questions to ask during interviews. Not only do we discuss and solve the problem, we take it one step further and deploy the code to AWS to make a working solution.

Code: https://github.com/tpaulus/python-urlshortener-cdk

Tom Paulus

December 02, 2021
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  1. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Tom Paulus, Software Development Engineer
    EC2 Commercial Software Services
    December 2, 2021
    From Degree to Day Job
    How to get your foot in the door and where it can take you.

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  2. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Summary
    • Background: Who am I and what do I do?
    • How did I get to where I am today?
    • Interviews at Amazon: Tips from the other side of the table
    • Solving an Amazon Interview Coding Question (and taking it a step further)
    • Q & A

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  3. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    A little bit about myself

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  4. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Who am I & what do I do?
    • Software Development Engineer II (SDE II)
    at Amazon Web Services working on EC2
    Image Builder. Mainly focus on the service
    Control Plane (APIs) and the Service
    Operations (Integration Tests, Canary
    Tests, Monitoring, Alarming, etc.)
    • I’ve been at Amazon for almost 4 years
    working on the same team, although what
    we work on has changed significantly
    from when I started.
    • I wear A LOT of hats, one of them being
    supporting my organization with AWS’s
    C2S Contract.
    C2S is the government program and contract vehicle that brings AWS “over the fence” and into the Intelligence Community (IC). This air-gapped AWS
    Region on the Top Secret fabric has been operating since 2014 and is exclusively available to the U.S. IC.

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  5. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    How did I end up at Amazon
    • Attended San Diego State University from
    2015-2018, majoring in Computer Science
    (B.S.).
    • Applied to Intern at 13 different
    companies in the Fall of 2017 including
    Apple, Google, Amazon, ServiceNow,
    Facebook, Netflix, Intuit.
    • Summer Internship with Amazon Web
    Services in the Summer of 2018.
    • Returned to AWS as a Full Time Software
    Development Engineer (SDE I) in the
    Summer of 2018, moving to Seattle along
    the way.

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  6. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Interviewing at
    Amazon
    Tips from the other side of the table

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  7. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    What will be asked of you?
    • Online Assessment
    • Interns: 1 Interview
    • Full Time: 3 Interviews
    • Each interviewer will typically ask
    you two behavioral and one
    functional (coding) question.
    • Each behavioral question will
    focus on one of Amazon’s
    Leadership Principals
    Interviewers are looking for you to
    respond using the STAR method.
    Situation/Task
    Action
    Result
    Answering using the STAR Method
    will give your interviewer what they
    need to support hiring you!

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  8. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Amazon’s Leadership Principals (LPs)
    • Customer Obsession
    • Ownership
    • Invent and Simplify
    • Are Right, A Lot
    • Learn and Be Curious
    • Hire and Develop the Best
    • Insist on the Highest Standards
    • Think Big
    • Bias for Action
    • Frugality
    • Earn Trust
    • Dive Deep
    • Have Backbone; Disagree and
    Commit
    • Deliver Results
    • Strive to be Earth's Best Employer
    • Success and Scale Bring Broad
    Responsibility

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  9. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Solving an Amazon
    Coding Problem
    And then deploying it to AWS via CDK

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  10. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    How to create a TinyURL system?
    TinyURL is a URL shortening service, a web service that provides short aliases for
    redirection of long URLs. So if you would design and implement a system, in the
    language of your choice, that allows people input URLs with short alias URLs
    generated, how would you do it?

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  11. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Let’s Write Some Code

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  12. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.

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  13. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    AWS Cloud Development Kit
    CDK is an open-source software development framework to define
    cloud infrastructure in code and provision it through AWS
    CloudFormation.
    It offers a high-level object-oriented abstraction to define AWS
    resources imperatively using the power of modern programming
    languages. Using the CDK’s library of infrastructure constructs, you can
    easily encapsulate AWS best practices in your infrastructure definition
    and share it without worrying about boilerplate logic.

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  14. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    CDK Output → CloudFormation

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  15. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Try it out!
    Use CURL or your browser to make new short URLs:
    curl ‘https://go.paulusto.people.aws.dev/?targetUrl=example.com’
    Then try visiting the returned
    short-url in a browser!

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  16. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Q&A
    Tom Paulus

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  17. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Thank You!
    Code: https://github.com/tpaulus/python-
    urlshortener-cdk
    Slides: https://tompaulus.com/#talks

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