tl;dr in tech by Joe Karlsson - Issue #11
tl;dr: “A truly great leader is someone that can not only figure out the impact of a potential decision, they can fully understand the impact of that decision on all the people who will be touched by it.” Evan Cooke, former Twilio CTO, outlines the two significant issues faced by CTOs of later stage startups
1) Not knowing fellow leaders well enough
2) Misunderstanding the needs of the company - and how to navigate them.
tl;dr: “Repeating the conclusion isn’t useful. The question that reached that conclusion is useful over and over.” Yet, Jessica points to the fact that we tend to replicate team structures of successful companies without asking the right questions. Instead of “what do successful teams do?” ask “how did that team that worked well reach its way of working?”
tl;dr: “Engineering Enablement teams’ main goal is to reduce complexity and improve development velocity and time to market by providing self-service solutions, engineering standards, and best practices. The team aims to enable developers to focus on business logic and puts an emphasis on developer experience and product quality.” Tal discusses this team’s role in detail, who they are and their purpose.
tl;dr: “Quantization reduces the number of bits required to store a number. In other words, it reduces the precision of the number. The basis behind it is to divide our number by a quantum and then round to the nearest integer.” Bilal talks us through each step taken for JPEG compression to happen.
tl;dr: “This quick ‘n dirty hack that I wrote in a couple of minutes replaced two weeks’ worth of work in 1987 and ran almost two million times faster.” Curtis shows us the BASIC code he wrote 35 years ago and its contemporary counterpart.
tl;dr: “If you speed up your website by 2 seconds, everyone agrees that that’s a good thing with a visible user impact. If you reduce your website’s memory leak by 2 MB, can we still agree it was worth it? Maybe not.” Nolan discusses the unique characteristics of memory leaks:
3) Trivial to fix once diagnosed.
tl;dr: “When you operate at this type of scale, centralization is the enemy of efficiency. This is a paradox. Being efficient on a macro level requires being (very) inefficient at the micro level.” Ben discusses the implications of this in - documentation is essential, teams are fragile and suffer from churn, everything is urgent and takes forever, everything is built in house.