From the TL;DR in Tech archive, originally sent on Substack. Some links may have died since.

tl;dr in tech by Joe Karlsson - Issue #3

tl;dr: I recently joined Liesse Jones from the DevOps State of Mind podcast to talk about an often overlooked facet of DevOps, data and databases. Be sure to check out if you want to hear my best practices for how to transform how you deploy your databases.

You can check my latest podcast wherever you get your podcasts or read along with the transcript on the LogDNA blog.

tl;dr: The following behaviors help engineers avoid the trap of the manager’s schedule. Engineers should be:

1) Defensive of their time.

2) “Pay themselves first” - deciding how to allocate time in advance.

3) Defend the time of others.

4) Clearly designate interrupt-driven work and batch it.

5) Designate low-leverage work, and time-box it.

6) Communicate with candor.

7) Prioritize ruthlessly.

tl;dr: Complexity metrics are flawed but, can be “useful to isolate a part of your codebase which might be more prone to defect.” Matthieu believes it’s a combination of metrics, experience, and experiments that reveal complexity in a codebase. He explains and uses the following metrics in this order when analyzing complexity:

1) LOC.

2) Code shape.

3) Structural coupling (common and content coupling).

4) Logical coupling.

tl;dr:

1) “The greatest boost to productivity is ownership.” If you feel like you’ve lost ownership over something, one sentence (or action) can make you feel like you have regained it.

2) Build your resilience through exercise, meditation, and “subjecting yourself to extremes” e.g. cold showers.

3) Calibrate your energy using power poses and

tl;dr: “A few of the things that come to mind, this thanksgiving:”

1) Open/read/write/close.

2) Goroutines as they “breathes new life” into simple blocking I/O.

3) SQLite, as it’s an “island of stability.” David shares a handful more he’s thankful for.

tl;dr: “Collectively, the information voluntarily submitted to the IRRs (Internet Routing Registries) forms a distributed database of Internet routing instructions that helps connect a vast array of individual networks.” Brian illustrates how IRRs can be spoofed - by a simple email - to remove or alter routing entries for multiple e-commerce providers, banks and telecommunications companies at the same time.

tl;dr: “This year we’re excited to share the patterns we’ve seen across the community as well as three deeper dives:”

1) Shipping code

2) Creating documentation

3) Sustaining communities.”

tl;dr: This is a list of recurring anti-patterns that Jérôme sees when he helps folks with their container build pipelines, and he provides suggestions to avoid them or refactor them into something better.

tl;dr:

1) Treat alerts as code.

2) Use percentiles over averages.

3) Have a playbook to document each alert.

4) Use Prometheus Alertmanager PagerBeauty to show who is on-call.

5) Automate all your pages.

6) Perform routine tests.

7) Make sure you have an incident management framework

tl;dr: “With a little bit of care, [a git commit] can be something that helps us stay on top of things. It can be a container for related changes that belong to one and only one topic, and thereby make it easier for us to understand what happened.”