Farewell, and Thank You
I’ve worked at Amazon, Microsoft, and other great companies. But Starbucks gave me the most room to stretch — to build strange, ambitious, soulful things with people who cared and could throw down.
We started as an API team. We became a data team. Then a feature encoding team. Then a bit of a time-traveling, cache-abusing, schema-fighting, EDI-reversing anomaly wrapped in a Spark job.
We:
- Built a Kafkaesque service on four [lambda] VMs that handled 200 TPS after a rocky launch. Born in fire, ran in hertz, peppered with pointers and “unsafe” — it would’ve made OSHA blush.
- Made our own Airflow-like orchestrator, with memoization and a reference-counted Spark gc. Who does that? We did.
- Reimagined BizTalk (yes, that BizTalk), wrote a config-based EDI parser from scratch.
- Delivered what FAANG folks treat as interview fantasy problems — in production, with uptime, and swagger, and often under hiring and budget freezes.
Despite it all, we somehow reconciled ledgers, reduced fraud by tens of millions, enabled tip payouts, improved training, and supplied intelligence back to the business in ways that mattered.
And we released more than once a sprint. Like it was nothing.
What about reliability? We were about as reliable as S3 that we had to be careful not to automate ourselves out of a job. Luckily, a vendor or adjacent system always gave us something to rescue. Slight hyperbole, but not much.
To my teammates: you guys are awesome. It’s probably an understatement to say that it would have taken most FAANG teams at least an order or two of magnitude more people to pull off half of what we did.
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This wasn’t a gift from Starbucks. This was a miracle pulled off by people who cared too much and knew too much to phone it in.
Thanks for putting up with me as tech lead. You made this chapter one of the best — and probably the weirdest.
🚒 A Story I Never Told
In high school, I had three close friends. We were international students in a foreign land. Our parents definitely overpaid for our education.
So we made a vow:
One day, we’d own our time. Our work. Our lives.
Decades passed. We got jobs. We got cynical. We got tired. Some dreams folded. Some friends drifted. But this one didn’t die.
Now, after years building other people’s empires — I’m going to try building my own.
Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t. But I’m not going to croak without trying.
To my two friends: I doubt you’ll see this.
But if you do… here’s to our dreams.
To anyone still holding onto theirs:
Swing. With everything you’ve got. Before we’re too old, too frail, too tired.
While there’s still breath and light — don’t go down gently into the night.
Some day AI will claim our jobs.
But today, we run. And we laugh while running.
🐧️🖋️ See you out there.
