About Me

Perhaps it was the lost child you helped find her mother. Perhaps it was the beggar in Downtown Seattle who received a couple dollars from you. Maybe your parents urged you toward medicine, and maybe you chose theatre. What if you stayed at home? Took the offer. Said no. Said yes.

I've been thinking about forks in the road lately. We like to talk about life as if it were a clean outline: school, training, job, wedding, mortgage, done. Mine never sat still long enough to draw straight lines. It felt more like walking inside a kaleidoscope. A small turn, a new pattern. Sometimes the turn was gentle; sometimes it knocked me sideways. I taught kids to code and learned how to explain loops to a room that would not listen. I built a paramedic division ground-up and rode in the sort of quiet that fills an ambulance after the shouting ends. I played badminton on Tuesdays and assembled a compettive team of talented atheletes. I did theatre on wednesdays and won prizes in state competitions. I tried to build a mental-health startup and discovered that product roadmaps don’t help when the team did not believe in the product. I tried fixing relationships; called friends and girlfriends I thought I’d lost and asked for coffee.

I kept worrying I was scattered.

It took me a while to see the through-line. Under the hops and detours, I kept choosing the same kind of work: build the base that lets other people do hard things. Foundations for people, for relationships, for distributed systems at an insane scale.

That instinct pulled me into High-Performance Computing. At Amazon AGI, I build the infrastructure that lets state-of-the-art multimodal LLMs learn and reason. My days are scaling clusters and scheduling policies, chart upgrades and data movement, experiment guardrails, tools that make a bad run obvious and a good run repeatable. Clean pipelines, predictable clusters, alerts that wake the right person once instead of the wrong people all night. I like that bargain. I like being the reason something just works.

When I build, I picture a galaxy. The bright arms demand attention; the dark matter holds the shape. You don’t see the pull, but you feel it everywhere. I want to be that pull—steady and unfussy. I don’t need my name in the release notes. I want the team to move faster because the floor doesn’t wobble.

The world is very loud right now. Sirens and songs, protests and parades, news that angers you, news that lifts you for a minute. We’re trying to understand new tools while we’re already using them at full speed. Some days AI feels like a ladder; other days it looks like a pit of disappointment. I don’t pretend to hold the answers, but I care about supporting the people looking for the solutions. If we pour the footing well, we’ll have choices later. If we rush the base, the rest will tilt.

Those small forks keep returning. A teammate asks for an hour I think I don’t have. Say yes. An SDE (or me, mostly) ships something risky and needs a thorough review. Slow down. A funny-looking bug appears deep in the code, fix it now, explain why. None of these are big decisions, but they decide the work. They decide the culture. I used to look for the one turning point that would define everything. Now I try to notice the turns I’m making all day.

I think I am starting to live in the moment.

I still carry pieces of those earlier lives. Teaching kids to code taught me patience and the joy of a clean “aha.” Paramedic work taught me triage, the kind that applies to incidents and also to SEV2 Tickets. Badminton taught me that play and focus can live in the same hour. The startup and other administrative work taught me that people can’t build good things when they’re breaking under circumstances, and that taking care of each other is not a distraction from the mission; it’s the only way the mission survives.

If there’s a philosophy under all this, it’s simple: build for breathing room. Create slack so others can attempt the impossible. Write a runbook someone actually wants to open. Measure what matters and delete dashboards that don’t. Keep your promises small enough to keep and large enough to matter. When something fails, write down what you learned and move on without theatrics.

And learn to love the moment. Because in that very point of time, you can be anything in the universe by choosing your fork.

I don’t know if this is destiny or just gravity from all my earlier choices. I know it feels right. So I will do what I do best: trust my instinct and keep going. I will try to burn bright for the people around me, to be the support and infrastructure they need.

And I'm sure you feel the same pressure in your own lane. The sense that everything and anything is happening all at once and that someone still has to lay cable, label the breaker panel, and sweep the floor before the opening. That’s the fork I stand at most days. Not a grand either/or but a simple question: will you do the quiet thing that makes the hard thing possible?

I try to answer yes. I try to be useful. I try to take the fork.

— Lee