Great short post on Minimal Mac: Rather than say: “I am too busy, I don’t have any time for X.” I realize I can be honest and say I am not interested enough in X to do it. Saying no is saying yes to other things. I agree. We all say we’re busy, all the time. I meet people and I ask “How are things?”, and they quite always answer “Busy”. ... Read more

Fred Wilson works at Union Square Ventures. A few days ago he wrote a blog post titled “blogs we read”. Quoting from him (bold is mine): “Blog discovery is still too hard. There are so many great blogs out there and it is still too hard to find them.” I agree! Therefore, I decided to write my own list of blogs to follow. But first… Why these blogs should be important to you? ... Read more

Yesterday I had to install a few things from scratch on my Macbook air with Mac OS 10.7. It was ages since the last time I’ve installed the AWS Toolkit for Eclipse. What is Eclipse? A software development environment, which you can run on Windows, Mac OS X and any Linux flavor. What is the AWS Toolkit? A plugin for Eclipse that makes it easier to develop Java Applications that use Amazon Web Services. ... Read more

I’m launching a new initiative: Cloud Riders. Hackathon + Cloud + Travel. The first one will be San Francisco to Las Vegas, in conjunction with our first global conference, AWS Re: Invent. Check the link.

In the last posts, I focused solely on work-related stuff. I will keep doing this in the future, however one occasional, off-topic post doesn’t hurt. In fact, it’s cross-pollination, and diverse topics, that stimulate creativity and interest. (p.s. remember that there is a monthly newsletter, if you like love what I write) Today I’m writing about “car ownership”, as a consequence of something that I’ve read a few minutes ago. Look at this figure below. ... Read more

I’ve just finished reading Why remote workers are more (yes, more) engaged, on the Harvard Business Review website. Very interesting read. I often write that “I feel lucky”. No, I don’t mean a random search result: Instead, I mean that I really enjoy many aspects of my current job at Amazon Web Services. In particular, one of these aspects is the fact that I can work from any place I want. ... Read more

If you’re bored, and don’t really know how to spend those five minutes of extra time that you have every month… Well, sign up for my monthly newsletter!

Tough to focus on a single thing, when there are so many interesting things out there. In this case, I just want to share some of them with you. But before that, let me tell you why I think this is important: in our busy lives, it’s difficult to find enough time to read our feeds, or in general to get informed about cool things. The time I spent in finding those things is gone… But you can benefit from it, as long as you find those things interesting as well :) ... Read more

Today at Amazon Web Services (AWS) we’ve announced Glacier, a low cost, fully redundant data data archiving storage infrastructure for storing any amount of data. What I really like is the starting page on the main AWS website. Simple and beautiful. If you want to know more about Glacier, click the picture. Also, remember that we have an upcoming global conference, called AWS Re:invent, happening in Las Vegas on Nov 27th-29th. ... Read more

I’ve just read this excellent article on the New York Times (online), called The Busy Trap. In essence, it says that life is short, we all like to say that we’re busy to feel important, but at the end we might be victims of the busy trap. I don’t necessarily agree on everything, but I found the article fascinating, and stimulating. I’m lucky. My job, despite being intense and sometimes very demanding, gives me a lot of rewards, not just in terms of money, but in a more general sense. ... Read more