This is such a weird blog post.

It's full of technical details, but I'm really not sure who they're for. There's nothing particularly novel or impressive. If anything the fact that it took them this long should be embarrassing. They pad it out with a table of stats that are just kind of meh? Congrats I guess for releasing something without burning the house down?

As an on-and-off customer of theirs I tried to quickly skim for some of the details that would impact me, the theoretical end-user, but the vast majority of TFA is just about how they pulled off this apparent feat of engineering.

I'm not trying to be pessimistic, and I don't fault the author (but I question the culture). I honestly don't get who this is for.

For the record this is something they should have had... at least six or seven years ago?

I for one appreciate them sharing this and found it a very interesting read. Many of us don't have experiences at companies at this scale and so it's nice whenever I get to read about what happens behind the scene.

Usually I expect an eng blog post to be a recruitment vehicle, wherein the authors articulate a really hard problem they solved, or some novel approach they took, or the cool new open source project they released (for their future SaaS play).

But this is so mundane it bothers me in a way I find surprising. It's more about how they made some questionable choices in the past and how they finally paid off that technical debt. Is it interesting? Perhaps I am just getting old and jaded.

What I find odd is how light TFA is on actual details as to what it is they shipped.

This is the kind of thing I'd ship internally to the org as part of a weekly update or something, but not what I'd expect on a public-facing corporate blog.