A Critical Approach to Evaluating Technical Content

Our natural tendency to chase shiny objects and succumb to various cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias, often leads us to overlook valuable insights hidden in seemingly uninteresting content. This phenomenon was recently demonstrated by two strikingly similar blog posts published by the Prime Video team:

1. How Prime Video ingests, processes, and distributes live TV to millions of customers around the world while reducing costs (link )
2. Scaling up the Prime Video audio-video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90% (link )

The first blog post is technical and informative, showcasing Prime Video's live-streaming architecture, tools, and technologies. It provides a detailed account of their process, enabling readers to understand how the service works. The tone is educational, and proud of the achievements.

The second blog post focuses more on the audio-video monitoring service's improvement and cost reduction. The tone is bold and revolutionary, explaining the unconventional approach taken to scale and optimize the service, including moving from microservices to a monolithic architecture and not using serverless due to high costs.

Despite the minimal differences in titles and subject matter, the second post garnered significant attention and sparked a furor in the DevOps community, while the first went largely unnoticed. Why? Primarily because of the content tone and the development community's biases. The move from microservices to a monolithic architecture goes against the popular trend of using microservices to build scalable and resilient systems. Their decision not to use serverless technology due to high costs contradicts the widely-held belief that serverless is cost-effective.

Those decisions look revolutionary on paper. However, they are mundane; many businesses make similar survival decisions.

This highlights the importance of honing our ability to analyze information, extract value, and apply it in context rather than being swayed by attention-grabbing narratives.

To become better-informed engineers, we must first recognize and acknowledge our biases and tendency to be drawn to novelty and controversy. Then we can develop a more critical mindset and avoid falling into the trap of prioritizing hype over substance.

Assessing technical content's relevance to our specific needs and objectives is crucial. While a bold, unconventional approach may be exciting and thought-provoking, it's essential to consider whether it would be applicable or beneficial in our context or business. In the case of the two Prime Video blog posts, both offered valuable insights and lessons, but the hype surrounding the second post obscured the practical value of the first.

By analyzing information in context, we can make informed decisions and continue to build robust, scalable, and cost-effective systems. This requires us to look beyond the surface-level appeal of shiny, new ideas and critically assess the merits of both the novel and the well-established.

In conclusion, making well-informed decisions in the rapidly evolving technology landscape requires professionals to adopt a systematic approach often used in research.

1. Look over all available sources thoroughly - rather than one piece with catchy headlines.
2. Compare and contrast various perspectives to understand different solutions and ideas.

This helps determine the value and applicability of each approach to one's situation. Base decisions on a solid understanding of established practices and innovative approaches - rather than hot-takes and technical "influencers"!