About

My name is James Hood. I graduated from the University of Arizona with a BS in Computer Engineering and minors in Computer Science and Math. I worked as a software developer for IBM, working on enterprise disk storage servers for the first 6 years of my career. In 2009, I was hired at Amazon and am now a Principal Software Engineer. I worked in AWS for 3 years, then switched to Amazon fulfillment software for the next 5 years before returning to AWS to help forward the serverless movement, building and launching the AWS Serverless Application Repository, working on AWS SAM, and helping open source a realworld serverless application example to help others learn serverless best practices. I’m now contributing to the future of infrastructure as code as a member of the AWS CloudFormation team.

I’m passionate about writing quality software that works at scale and teaching others how to do the same. I’m a full stack developer with both web UI and backend experience. However more recently, my focus has been on serverless applications, microservice architecture, and infrastructure as code.

Working in Amazon’s culture of highly autonomous, 2-pizza teams for the last decade, I have gained a lot of experience helping to form strong team cultures and avoid common pitfalls in software development. I maintain a blog on Amazon’s internal network and have given several talks that I can’t share publicly. However a lot of the content of my blogs and talks are not Amazon-specific, so I’m maintaining this external blog to share my thoughts on software development with the wider community.

In my free time I enjoy reading, being outdoors with my wife and two daughters, running, and playing/watching ice hockey.

All opinions expressed on this website are my own and do not represent the opinions of Amazon, its partners or subsidiaries.