As part of my role on the SDK team at AWS, I fought for the user at every opportunity against the cultural inertia that existed at the time. I successfully pushed/lobbied for:
- an SDK for both web browsers and Node.js
- publishing AWS SDKs on GitHub; open-sourcing SDKs with the Apache 2.0 license (formerly used the Amazon Software License)
- development of non-secret SDK improvements to happen in the open
- the underlying AWS service models became exposed to end-users (as JSON)
- the creation of https://github.com/awslabs to exist as a place for unofficial AWS projects
- waiter functions that are now commonplace in the AWS SDKs and AWS CLI
- AWS development blogs and Twitter accounts
- the ability for AWS employees to answer questions on StackOverflow