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 #7

tl;dr: “Easter eggs are unexpected or undocumented feature in a piece of computer software, included as a joke or bonus” and, among the enthusiast community, “people seem to generally like this concept in software and devices.” Dan explains why he’s against adding them into Curl.

Cloud security is a shared responsibility and a big challenge. Here are the basic rules to have in mind to set up efficient guardrails.

tl;dr: “It’s a lot harder to notice the magic of particular phrases or approaches when you see someone do it.” Lara suggests developing this skill by noticing how other leaders speak. What do they say? How do they say it? Watch how they change the direction of the conversation, pause the conversation, decrease tension, create clarity, push back, etc… Lara suggests sitting in on meetings you normally wouldn’t e.g. product or sales to pinpoint 3 new techniques or phrases that you can then start experimenting with.

tl;dr: The first major input in any kind of fair evaluation is based on the work the employee needed to accomplish, and the work they did accomplish. Camille breaks this down into “must be achieved, stretch goals, and moonshot goals” elaborating on each. She also discusses identifying management characteristics essential to the role so you can score the candidate against each, while also giving leeway for your own judgment.

tl;dr: “Besides the fact that people like me get extremely stressed implementing a new algorithm in a time limit without being able to exercise the code, while someone is watching and asking questions, there are diminishing returns to spending the 30th or 40th minute on the same topic, and this is such a tiny part of your job anyway.” Kevin believes it would be better to ask a larger number of “easily gradable” questions and provides examples.

tl;dr: The recent vulnerability discovered in log4j2 is a “perfect microcosm of all of the major ecosystem problems with “Open Source.” It is “a culture of taking from open source without giving anything back.” This software is used by the largest of companies while the maintainer of log4j2 describes his work as “a spare time passion project,” with a total of 3 people funding it prior to the vulnerability being discovered. Christine believes it’s an obligation for companies to donate in return for using OS software.

tl;dr: Annual deck that covers “the transformative visions for 2025 or 2030: crypto, web3, VR, metaverse… and then everything else. Meanwhile, hundreds of start-ups take ideas from the last decade and deploy them over and over in one industry after another.”

tl;dr: “While the Internet was designed and founded as a decentralized network-of-networks, it is continuously subjected to forces that encourage its centralization.” This document attempts to identify different types of centralization, catalogs some limitations to common approaches to controlling it and recommends best practices for protocol designers.

tl;dr: Great engineering teams focus on milestones instead of projects Managing projects is hard. Companies contort themselves to do it well. Instead of playing chess, switch to checkers. Milestones are an easier game, and you get better results.

tldr: Why is Rust being used to replace parts of the JavaScript web ecosystem like minification (Terser), transpilation (Babel), formatting (Prettier), bundling (webpack), linting (ESLint), and more?