Today is my third anniversary with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

If I had to describe this last year with one word it would be “change”.

Unlike a lot of people I know who really don’t care for change, I tend to embrace it. Those who have known me for a long time will remember when I had problems staying in any one place for more than about six months. As I’ve matured I’ve been able to combine my love of change with stability (until recently I lived in the same house for 25 years and I’ve been married for over 32 years) and while I rarely seek out change these days, it doesn’t bother me.

When I joined AWS there were six people on my team. Half of us had been there for about two years and the other half about two months. Open Source Strategy and Marketing (yes, OSSM is awesome) exists to improve and optimize how AWS relates to our open source customers and the open source community at large, and even though I’m biased we have made some serious progress toward that goal during my time here.

Since I’ve started my boss has been promoted and is now is charge of a much, much larger group, and our OSSM team has grown significantly as well. Like most tech companies, the new focus on Generative AI has brought its own challenges, and we are still figuring out what GenAI means within open source. We still get to work with non-AI specific projects such as Valkey.

There have also been some negative impacts to my health. I had to go on medication for high blood pressure for the first time in my life. I’ve had many more issues with acid reflux, especially when I travel, and at times I have to take things to help me sleep. Usually it is just melatonin but more often than I would like I’ll take ZzzQuil, which is just a liquid form of Benadryl.

When I started 2025 my plan was to severely curtail my travel, but since FOSDEM at the beginning of February I’ve spent 11 of 15 weeks on the road. All this travel has given me time to think, and I tried to examine why I was more stressed out as an AWS employee than I was running my own company for 20 years.

Of course I had sleepless nights when I was a CEO in charge of making sure my team got paid, but not to the scale I’ve had since joining AWS. I think the main reason was that I was pretty much in control of my own destiny. Of course I couldn’t control everything: customers leave, people leave, conditions change, but how I responded to issues was totally up to me.

AWS has a very driven culture and I feel the need to constantly prove myself. People take different tacts. Some focus on the politics of the environment and work to move up through the ranks. I am toward the end of my career so that doesn’t interest me. What I focus on at AWS is what I’ve always focused on: customers. I believe now as I believed then that doing the best you can for your customers is the only way for a company to be successful in the long term, and what keeps me up at night is trying to figure out the best way to do that when I work for a very large company where I don’t always feel I have any agency.

Customer satisfaction is where I will continue to focus as long as I continue to work, and my main goal for year four is to figure out, in the words of a mentor of mine, how to bend AWS to my will (grin). I will also focus on ways to reduce my stress and improve my health, as I can’t help customers if I stroke out.

And I get to work with some amazing customers. These are the organizations taking open source to the next level, and showing just how powerful the flexibility and transparency that comes with open source software can be.

But there is always the question of how to make money with open source. I honestly believe that the best way to make money while remaining true to open source is by providing a hosted version where you make things simpler, more secure, and more scalable for your users, and AWS is the best place to run those workloads.

Luckily I won’t be doing this alone. I work with some amazing people and our team continues to grow.

One of those weeks I spent on the road was for a team all-hands meeting in Seattle. As part of that we did a scavenger hunt (I was on the blue team) and the above picture features me, Allison Stock, Paloma Gragera Ariño, Mike Chambers, and Stephen Preston taking a selfie in The Spheres as part of that challenge. It was fun.

I have more thoughts on this past year but I am getting ready to take a few days of much needed vacation in order to “regroove” my brain, so I’m going to stop now. My career at AWS continues to be exciting and I’m eager to see where we go in this next year.