How time flies and how I grow older. I almost finished my fifth year working for Amazon Alexa (the voice service, not the web service that unfortunately got shut down). The fact that Alexa is now 10 years old and I lived half of it definitely made me feel old. The team I work for has moved on to work on non-Alexa stuff in the new year. It would be a proper time now to reflect and appreciate a bit.
I work for the AGI Information organization, formerly known as Alexa Knowledge. My team was dedicated to build visual experiences for Information Q&A experiences anywhere that Alexa has a screen presence. That involves selecting the right layout, getting the right data, and building the actual frontend presentation. I feel privileged to be able to work on the same feature during all the ups and downs, which is very unusual in the past few years.
- 2020: I joined Alexa Information as a new grad. The team was new with half transfers and half new hires like me, who all need to figure out how to work together remotely, and how to take care of the new service we took over out of a reorg. We needed to migrate our frontend technology to Alexa Presentation Language (APL), and no one on the team really understood how the older propriety frontend technology works either. I ended up being the core contributor of all the APL frontend and the old one for our features since then. I am also very grateful of working with the talented engineers who built infographics libraries and Graphiq integration as part of this migration effort; they didn’t have much to copy-paste from the more mature chart libraries elsewhere.
Now it really reminds me of the first few months of COVID after my January graduation and before my work contract started. I stayed in my apartment and wrote a lot of application code based on the FastAPI framework. It is not the most mature framework, but I got into that community so well in those two months that I still get random emails from time to time. This is still the way I work and code. Hopelessly dedicated, you may say.
- 2021: My org was rebranded as Alexa Knowledge. We still had only one UX designer. I was a core contributor to bring our Q&A visualization to Partial Overlay, Echo Show 15, and Arabic. As well as a few months of away-team help on a now-defunct Alexa Answers voice feature. I won’t forget my oncall week with code freeze, that feature launch, and log4j, everything all at once.
- 2022: We had zero designer and one design technologist by the end of the year. Personally I finally got to see some west coast colleagues in person on my personal capacity which I cherish (it seems never going to have work travel for me on this job). Did some work for the Winter Olympics (mostly patching the legacy frontend to support some content deals). Migrated everything into APL. Helped build a new exploration feature beyond the first screen by dynamically loading data. Learned new stuff about Rxjava. I think it was around this time that the team started growing responsibility and senior people picked up design that I can just chill about.
- 2023: Personally this was hell of a year I should have wrote a retrospective but I of course didn’t. I took a long vacation that meant a lot to me. And you know, layoffs started and LLM exploded.
For the first one it meant we needed to use more flexible frontend layouts to earn money, which also required backend refactoring. I helped implementing some frontend and backend. That was probably the most stunning visual we build and fully own.
For the LLM, I wasn’t involved too much but there was a press event that demoed something that went through our service. Meantime the organization became Alexa Information and then AGI Information.
At this point we got a full UX design team with an actual design manager, and I got a Figma editor license (after some begging and some permission troubleshooting) until recently it got revoked.
- 2024: I got to build visualization for the new Echo Spot. The old Echo Spot had been my favorite device but the new model is no longer the same thing. Still cute though.
And then, some double down on the LLM. I built some now-deprecated small SageMaker-based inference service where we actually refreshed the model a few times. I integrated the APL runtime into an end user facing web product (most time spent reducing React render passes), working with some nice people who were funded and passionate to work frontend, which is a bit rare at Alexa. I was a core contributor of the new sports and finance card. The hardest part was to pick the em/en dash. I ended up rolling it back to match the mainstream treatment and obviously no one noticed.
- 2025: The release was delayed and delayed with occasional Business Insider haunts. Although we have a new executive leader so the way things are done is probably different anyway. I watched the February live press event while monitoring our service dashboard on my oncall shift. I saw my sports card demoed, which is now owned by the team next door. And then I heard the product name, Alexa+.
It has been a long time since I got reminded that I work for a big company and I should avoid conflict of interest and talking about certain things. I hope this is ok. I never get to write a proper year-end reflection so this seems to be a good start (hell, I am already late on my own performance evaluation).
This whole blog has some LinkedIn hype which I don’t want to, but sincerely, I never expected myself working for a Voice Assistant which I never used before I joined, despite which I still get to use my prior non-CS tech knowledge at work. Staying at the same place for five years is like a dinosaur in the tech industry, and became uncool once I learned the word indie from my colleague; I stayed as I enjoy my time working on a complex, international product, learning how things work, and engaging with talented people. “…and more memories to come.” Hopefully.