Reading an engineering blog post without being fooled by it
Engineering blogs from large companies are among the best technical writing available for free, and they are also published by companies with hiring targets and reputations to manage. Reading them well means holding both facts at once.
Ask what the post is not saying
A post describing a successful migration will describe the successful migration. It will rarely mention the two attempts before it, the team that was reorganised midway, or the feature work that did not happen for eight months. Failures get written up far less often than successes, which skews the entire genre toward things that worked.
Check the scale before you copy the conclusion
This is the single most common misreading. A technique that solves a real problem at millions of requests per second may be actively harmful at a thousand, where it adds complexity against a problem you do not have. The post is usually honest about its context. Readers supply the overgeneralisation on their own.
Look at the date, then look again
A post from 2016 describes a decision made against the constraints of 2016 — the cloud offerings, the tooling and the hardware economics of that year. Some of it still holds. Some of it was overtaken and never updated, because there is little incentive to publish "our 2016 post is now wrong."
This is a real problem for a site like this one, incidentally. Half the interesting facts about company stacks are historical, and the interesting part is often the migration rather than the current state. Where an explanation here describes something that has since changed, it should say so.
Distinguish the reasoning from the outcome
The outcome — they chose X — is the least transferable part, because it depends on their constraints, their existing systems and who they had already hired. The reasoning is the valuable part: what they measured, what tradeoff they were making, what they were willing to give up.
A post that says "we chose Rust" teaches you almost nothing. A post that says "we chose Rust because garbage collection pauses were showing up in our p99 and we had already tried tuning them" teaches you how to recognise whether you are in the same situation. Read for the second thing.