To me the most interesting thing that came out of this article was exponential backoff-retry. I've always used e (natural log) as the base for my exponential backoff, and never used jitter (all my apps are single clients that are just trying to hit the AWS API, and none run simultaneously and I don't own the other side of it).

By looking it up I learned the concept of jitter, which is how Ethernet works, and I think it's really cool.