Walmart has an awesome research and development labs known as Walmart Labs in Bangalore. Flipkart has its development headquarters in Bangalore too. They have awesome engineers too.
Both Walmart Labs and Flipkart hire the best computer scientists and software engineering talent from across the country. They pay as much as and sometimes more than what Google Bangalore pays its engineers.
With Walmart now acquiring a majority stake in Flipkart, I can see the two strong and highly skilled engineering centers coming together and forming a formidable team to give a tough competition to Amazon.
A delightful thing I notice in their GitHub page is that Clojure seems to be the second most used language in Walmart Labs.
Seriously, Walmart and Clojure? Who would have imagined! I always thought of Walmart as a boring and traditional company that sells cheap goods. So when I heard about Walmart Labs, I thought all their coding must be in C++ or Java or even Cobol (who knows!).
But to see them using a dialect of Lisp like Clojure and Go more than Java and C++ warms my heart. :-)
Are you serious about these links as examples of nice things that Amazon has open sourced? Most of the projects there are development kits to work with Amazon products only.
Amazon has built a giant business on top of open source technologies. Don't you think it is natural for the open source community to expect that Amazon give something back to them out of courtesy?
The GP asked for a good thing that came out of Walmart Labs hinting at the idea that good things come out from Amazon but not Walmart Labs. Then a few commenters pointed out a few links showing the good things that came out of Walmart Labs. All of these good things happen to be open source. So it is quite natural to ask what good things Amazon bothered to open source after having built a billion dollar business on top of open source.
Walmart and WalmartLabs are two different entites. One is headquartered in Bentonville (AR) and the other is headquartered in San Bruno (CA). The Labs is the technology entity that is funded very generously by Walmart. I work for Walmart and I find the environment very fast paced, colleagues are very skilled and the pay is at par with Google and Amazon.
My current and previous jobs were with well funded non-IT companies that have an IT arm with their own executive structure. Unfortunately, the company is still shackled by shareholders who have their own ideas and do not understand on one hand, you have a massive company with huge profits. On the other hand you have another area, more nimble that is trying to innovate. Things eventually bleed (or, are bleeding over).
I wish you the best of luck. Not just for your job, but for Walmart. The world needs competition.
Both Walmart Labs and Flipkart hire the best computer scientists and software engineering talent from across the country. They pay as much as and sometimes more than what Google Bangalore pays its engineers.
With Walmart now acquiring a majority stake in Flipkart, I can see the two strong and highly skilled engineering centers coming together and forming a formidable team to give a tough competition to Amazon.