Passing the Story Along

"Why do the two Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) have such weird names?", an SDM casually asked me during our 1-on-1.

"Did you do a search at our wiki?" I returned the question.

"I did. But all I found were pages upon pages using the names. None really explained how they were named."

I laughed. Being one of the "seasoned" Amazon employees, thanks to my tenure, I happened to know the backstory of these peculiar names. So, I shared the tale. Then it dawned on me... every organization, given enough time, tends to develop its own set of oral traditions: These are the kind where knowledge, art, ideas, and cultural elements are shared and passed down verbally from one generation to the next.

Why hadn't I written it down? Good question. Initially, I assumed that everyone who needed to know, already did. But time has a funny way of blurring details. What was once common knowledge turned into a sort of myth, relying on someone curious enough to ask the right person the right question, to unlock the story.

The reality is that not all of our decisions were made with perfect rationale. We made plenty of calls based on gut instinct and the limited information we had at that moment. Our oral tradition isn't just about our victories and pride, but also about our challenges and shortcomings. "Why did we choose to use X?" You might imagine we had a meticulous performance evaluation to decide. We'd like to believe so, but the truth is often more like: "We were crunched for time, so we picked the simplest solution that we knew would work." Few of us are eager to highlight our moments of confusion or error, so we often pretend we've had everything figured out from the start.

"How about you write down the origins of the names on a wiki page?" I suggested to the SDM. "Then, years from now, when neither of us is here, the wiki could continue to pass the story along."