Amazon was a bookshop, until it wasn’t. Currently all its operating profit coms from its Amazon Web Services division. This statement slightly overstates the importance of AWS to Amazon, there is some accounting stuff going on for good reasons, but there is no doubt that AWS matters, it matters a lot.
And the journey from bookseller to cloud titan came after Jeff Bezos sent out a memo - the API Mandate - saying “just do this”. Not a long memo. We no longer have an original version of it, but the well known reconstructed version of it from Steve Yegge is only 129 words long.
If you have been reading this blog you will know the importance I attach to the difference between non-functional and functional requirements.
The API Mandate was a set of non-functional requirements imposed across a range of different business functions.
Given that my work largely focusses on how the state does non-functional requirements - could I write a version of Jeff Bezos’s API Mandate (but for government?
Well I had a pop, tell me wut’ya’reck.