[syoc]

Why would you do this? Redirect chain:

  https://tech.instacart.com/freezing-pythons-dependency-hell-in-2018-f1076d625241
  https://medium.com/m/global-identity?redirectUrl=https%3A%2F%2Ftech.instacart.com%2Ffreezing-pythons-dependency-hell-in-2018-f1076d625241
  https://tech.instacart.com/freezing-pythons-dependency-hell-in-2018-f1076d625241?gi=85c0588ca374

[pcl]

It looks like tech.instacart.com is hosted on Medium. The redirect is part of the auth flow. If you have a Medium account, you would have logged in to medium.com, not tech.instacart.com. If you don't have a Medium account, Medium still will want to add first-party tracking information to your interaction with tech.instacart.com and all other Medium properties. So this client-side redirect flow enables them to capture that association.

This is presumably what the `gi=85c0588ca374` query parameter is in the follow-on redirect. I would guess that `gi` stands for "global identity" or something.