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What is a COE at Amazon?

The Pragmatic Engineer • 0:57 minutes • Published 2025-07-12 • YouTube

📝 Transcript (31 entries):

A COE stands for it's a correction of error. It's this idea that you have holes in Swiss cheese and you have a failure requires that there's a hole across layers. That's the best reading. Like I would just subscribe to the email list where they were published internally. So you have this stream of disasters that are going on within the company and you grab some popcorn and you pop open one of these COE's and you learn so much from that. And I think that that's part of the secret sauce. The idea, and I don't know if it's like this for 100% of them, is that it's a blameless culture sort of thing. And so to really screw up requires that multiple people drop the ball. And you learn so much from that sort of stuff. The brownouts, these lessons that you would learn from trying to recover from really large dependencies. Those things are immortalized inside some of these COE's. So there's some very famous outages that happened within Amazon and there were an egg on our face. We really, really learned those lessons through those postmortems. They're absolutely wonderful. [Music]