"cyclotron" by Robert Couse-Baker is licensed with CC BY 2.0.
"cyclotron" by Robert Couse-Baker is licensed with CC BY 2.0.

Welcome to my personal site. My name is Parijat Mishra. I currently work at Amazon Web Services in the capacity of a manager of a team of awesome Solutions Architects, Via my team, and occasionally rolling up my sleeves myself, I help customers of Amazon Web Services adopt the AWS platform and get the most out of it.

In and out of work, my two favorite activities are to ask “How can we make this better?” and “How do we make this problem go away?”. I look for answers in technology, and how to apply it. Over the years I have come to realize that the correct application of technology to solve the right problems, and doing so in a sustainable way, is more important than the technology itself.

The title of my blog is a whimsical reference to The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. There are a few reasons this term appeals to me:

  • “Quantum mechanics is perhaps the most successful theory in the history of science… But it is also a theory that challenges our imagination.” I find that the world of cutting edge technology, such as cloud computing, is similar: almost no one disputes that some technologies would be very beneficial to their organization and business, but there is a need to explain them in terms that people can easily understand–and sometimes those explanations are counter-intuitive to people used to the “classical” way of doing things.
  • There is no definitive historical statement of what the Copenhagen Interpretation is. Various people have tried to synthesize some principles, attributing them to Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. However Bohr and Heisenberg has significant disagreements (as well as agreements) in their views. Similarly, there are many technology movements that practitioners are trying to define, in an evolving manner.
  • While there have been objections to some of the Copenhagen Interpretation’s principles, it is the most widely accepted label that physicists give to their own views. Similarly, technology “paradigms” like cloud computing, micro-services, serverless computing etc. have different definitions and principles, with most people largely agreeing on a core set of beliefs, but disagreeing about some of them.