Gareth Jones

Excited to be reflecting on my experience leading eBay's Velocity program in my talk at #CraftConf this week: "Platform Engineering: The Rise and Fall of eBay Velocity". It will be nuanced, and no-holds-barred, and cathartic. Starting in 2020, my (now ex-)team has touched every one of the 4000 engineers and 4500 services at eBay in one way or another, by driving Continuous Delivery and DevOps practices across the organization: improving the DORA metrics 3-5x, and *doubling* the engineering productivity of the teams. I could not be prouder of what that team has accomplished. Still, those improvements have stagnated, and eBay overall is still, as I like to say, "a household name with a flat business". US ecommerce has grown 8x since 2007; eBay's GMV is essentially flat to down vs inflation at 1.5x. What happened to this once-high-flying internet pioneer and stock market darling? Culture happened. After ~20 years of observation (I joined eBay the first time in 2004), and as the once CTO-in-waiting, I will share the following interrelated explanations: * Strategy and Planning: Innovator's Dilemma, learned helplessness, centralized waterfall planning, and a focus on Outputs instead of Outcomes * Technology Dead-Ends: Custom everything and industry-standard nothing; still not leveraging the public cloud in 2025 * Pathological Organizational Culture: Culture of fear, zero-sum thinking, and insular exceptionalism Peter Drucker famously quipped, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast". Apparently it eats business and technology, too.

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Thrilled to have joined the EdTech Insiders podcast, recorded live at Google's Learning in the AI Era event, for a deep dive into the future of learning! These are truly exciting times for AI and education, with so much potential on the horizon. We covered a lot of ground: - We explored how AI can be integrated into classrooms to personalize learning and bridge the gap between in-class and at-home learning, creating a more connected and effective experience. - I shared insights into LearnX's (my team) collaborative approach to driving learning innovations across Google, fostering partnerships and developing cutting-edge tools. - I introduced Learn About (available on Google Labs: https://lnkd.in/esYidUt7), our new AI-driven conversational tool that combines pedagogy with the web's resources for engaging and interactive learning. - We discussed our vision for AI to make high-quality, personalized education accessible to billions globally, breaking down barriers and democratizing knowledge. A big thanks to @EdTech Insiders for creating a platform to explore such exciting topics! Listen to the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/ebtG9dgx For a sneak peek at some of the other Google leaders' insights from the Learning in the AI Era event, check out this other podcast from EdTech Insiders: https://lnkd.in/eUyC8Vpm

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Excited to share that MongoDB Store for LangGraph is now live! This integration empowers agents with long‑term memory, enabling them to recall, evolve, and build upon user interactions across different sessions—no more goldfish memory. - Agents can finally remember, learn, and evolve across interactions. - Context isn’t lost — it compounds, making AI more useful over time. - Builders get a scalable, secure, and production-ready foundation to power the next wave of intelligent applications. With MongoDB, agents gain - JSON-native memory for complex state and interactions - Atlas Vector Search for semantic recall, not just keywords - TTL controls to manage memory lifecycle - Enterprise-grade scale & reliability for production use At MongoDB, we’re building the data backbone for adaptive, context-aware AI. This release moves us closer to a world where agents don’t just respond — they grow with you. https://lnkd.in/eGpx-SMc

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Yet to see a firm talk seriously about outcome growth from AI. It is all “output, output”. Which is ironic given that for over a decade software has enjoyed compounding output gains through abstractions, while outcomes have stayed flat or even declined. Nobody seemed interested in measuring that. Individual output gains can actually reduce the productivity of the system as a whole. More output does not guarantee better outcomes. My mental model is this: if we are creating software at ten to twenty times the pace we did before, then the upstream and downstream feedback loops would also need to scale by the same factor to make sure we are building the right thing. That is not only unrealistic but undesirable. When everything speeds up, the noise to signal ratio explodes, and it becomes harder to know what actually moved the needle and what is worth iterating on.

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Just tried the new Claude Agent SDK from Anthropic and it’s actually very good. Interesting part is its built-in session and memory management. The SDK explicitly supports automatic context-management and session handling so your agent doesn’t run out of context. The companion feature from Anthropic, the “memory tool” enables the model to read and write persistent files (in a /memories directory) between sessions, allowing it to maintain project context over time. Real session state, real memory, real continuity. Exciting times.

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Some exciting updates are coming to POS UI extensions 🚀 This summer, we introduced new capabilities: Direct API access, Storage API and new targets on the cart line item details screen. I'm excited to preview even more exciting things coming in 2025-10 and beyond. 🎨 Polaris We're lowering the barrier to making great POS UI extensions by bringing Shopify's single UI framework, Polaris, to POS. Write highly-performant, HTML-like code that works with any framework for any app and any extension surface, including Shopify POS. Preview components and examples in the release candidate documentation: https://lnkd.in/gwciA7CT We understand this is a big change if you've previously been writing your UI code with React. Get ready with our upgrade guide: https://lnkd.in/gjQAY-pf 🗺️ Navigation Extensions can present native detail screens. Present product details, product variant details, customer details, order details, and staff details without retail staff leaving your extension and workflow. Documentation: https://lnkd.in/gvmd6etq 🛒 Cart API We're adding support for subscriptions and making tweaks to how we provide your extension with updates from the cart. Documentation: https://lnkd.in/g3FCe-kX 📚 Documentation improvements We have added a new targets overview page that provides a great overview of available targets with improved descriptions and visuals: https://lnkd.in/g6nDZmu8 🛠️ Developer Experience We're making improvements to the developer experience with better in-app extension development tools, better debugging tools, and hot reloading. Keep an eye on upcoming versions of Shopify POS as we'll be rolling out these improvements into January. 🔮 Next-gen developer platform Shopify has launched a new Dev Dashboard, and we've transitioned apps and dev stores from the Partner Dashboard. Make sure to update to the latest version of Shopify's CLI and check out the latest news: https://lnkd.in/gkGvn7Tz

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Early in my career everything was about building large scale homogeneous systems. What’s been more interesting over the last 5y has been heterogeneous multi cloud systems. The tradeoffs are more complex to build simple (irreducible complexity) and elegant systems in that space.

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Thrilled and inspired to see the team quickly transmuting valuable customer feedback from Amazon S3 Tables GA launch last month into incremental improvements to delight customers. We are ending January with the following launches: 1) Amazon S3 Tables are now available in five additional AWS Regions - https://lnkd.in/gqd6rfYm 2) Amazon S3 Tables now support 10,000 tables per table bucket - https://lnkd.in/g7g58scy 3) Amazon S3 Tables add schema definition support to the CreateTable API - https://lnkd.in/gAhVAHAc Still Day1 with Amazon S3 Tables and we have more to do! #AmazonS3 #AmazonS3Tables #AWS

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