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 #8

tl;dr: New blog post alert! Key-value stores (like Redis) are perhaps one of the most popular databases on the market today - and with good reason! And in this post, I will show you how you can create a scalable key-value store in using just SQL.

tl;dr:

1) Engineering: How are things being built?

2) Execution: How are things getting built on time and within budget?

3) Operations: Is the built thing going to keep running?

4) People: Are people motivated taking part in what is being built?

5) Product: Are customers satisfied by what is being built?

6) Partners: Do all my partners understand and agree with all the above?

7) Company: How do I get the company to align with all these answers?

tl;dr: Agile is not achieving a sustainable speed in an optimal direction; “it is being able to change both speed and direction, and to do so easily. It is the second derivative of position with respect to time, not just the first: agility relates both to velocity and to the ability to change it, revising direction and pace as circumstances demand.”

tl;dr: “Incentives are never perfect because management always has a limited understanding of the system it manages.” Therefore, unrewarded work is often carried out to keep the system in place. However, Milosz argues, this results in management avoiding or ignoring issues and, in order, for change to happen, we must be open to failure on a personal level and culturally, as a company, for these issues to be tackled.

tl;dr: “I thought it might be fun sharing a few nitty-gritty details of how this “biggest innovation in human communication since the invention of the letter” works under the hood.” Nikita shows us the various ways in which emojis can be encoded.

tl;dr: “I built a site where you can do experiments with DNS called Mess With DNS. It has examples of experiments you can try, and you’ve very encouraged to come up with your own experiments. In this post I’ll talk about why I made this, how it works, and give you probably more details than you want to know about how I built it (design, testing, security, writing an authoritative nameserver, live streaming updates, etc).”

tl;dr: Ivan compiled a new data set for his model to train on: 3800 images of Lego faces. “The end product can be used for interesting applications including generating new Lego faces and morphing smoothly between Lego faces.”

tl;dr: As a leader, you must trust your team. However, trusting your team can, at times, be at odds with helping them succeed. Human error or bad processes can come into play. Will uses “inspected trust:” when someone “brings a problem or a concern to you, trust them that there is a problem, but give yourself space to independently verify their interpretation of the problem.” He highlights various ways of doing this.

tl;dr: For a leader to enable her team to be more effective, 3 conditions must be met:

1) Mutual trust amongst members.

2) A group identity i.e. members belong to a unique and worthwhile group.

3) Sense of group efficacy i.e. the belief that group members are more effective working together.

At the heart of these is the ability to create awareness of emotions and regulate them, and Ed presents a framework of 14 questions and a step-by-step process that allows a group to assess where they are collectively.

tl;dr: Seth shares a few scripts written by the engineering manager of the infrastructure team at Gitlab, who is tasked with coordinating large-scale infrastructure and code improvements. The scripts parse issues and epics in order to gain better visibility into the work that needs to be done.