Here's a little background on me to set the context for my posts.

Name: Tony Chor

Locations: Seattle, Washington, USA. Lived and worked in Woodbury, Minnesota. Born in Bozeman, Montana.

Professional stuff: I'm currently the Vice-President for the team responsible for the platforms and services on Amazon.com that allow our teams to build shopping customer experiences -- stuff like our mobile shopping apps, web application servers, content platform, media distribution, data APIs, user interface libraries, and some cross-site projects. I'm also responsible for community-based customer-facing features like Customer Reviews and Wishlists plus Deals and accessibility. Prior to this role, I managed the team that builds Amazon's product detail pages. These are the pages on Amazon that display the product information like price, images, descriptions, and reviews. I've been at Amazon since September, 2013.

Prior to Amazon, I was at Microsoft for 23 years. I was a Group Program Manager (like Product Management/Technical Program Management) and Group Manager (cross functional) in Bing for five years on the indexer/crawler, knowledge system, client apps like Bing for iPad, image and video search, and content filtering (i.e. adult content). I also led the Bing Program Management team in Beijing for 2.5 years of that.

Before Bing, I lead the PM team for Internet Explorer, helping rebuild the team after someone thought it was a good idea to disband the browser team. I started my blog during this time, so you'll see a lot of older posts about IE. I've also been the Product Unit Manager (aka Management Overhead) or some form of Program Manager on Works (Mac and Windows), Golf 1.0 for Windows, Bookshelf, Encarta Online, Picture It! and Home Publishing, children's titles like Magic School Bus, media and devices stuff for Windows, and an ill fated attempt to put 16-bit Windows into telephones. I came to Microsoft straight out of college in 1990.

Education: BS Computer Science, 1990, Stanford University

Family (and characters in this blog from time to time): Michelle (wife - the one with the taste and sense in the family), Andrew (24 - sweet boy), Michael (21 - evil genius)

Other interests: It seems my hobby is collecting hobbies. I'm a good geek who loves all manner of food and drink (especially whisky and anything that's crunchy, salty, or rich), photography, sailing, shooting, reading, travel, and electronic gadgetry. I go up and down through phases of exercising -- kick boxing, running, cycling, and swimming mostly, so there are a bunch of posts on that.

I wish I could play an instrument well, speak other languages really fluently, and get through all my email each day. I figure the first two are possible with a little discipline and hard work...

So, that's me in a nutshell. Back to the regularly scheduled program.