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 #29

Want to find out why I joined There are a lot of reasons I joined the team at Viam? Be sure to check out my new blog post where I walk through all the reasons why.

tl;dr: Varies on whether the company is early-stage, prioritizing growth or profitability.

1) Early stage: If you reduce your infrastructure costs to $0, and it doesn’t increase your runway by at least two months, it’s not worth focusing on.

2) Growth: “The fundamental question is whether infrastructure’s share of cost of goods sold are increasing as a percentage of revenue?”

3) Profitability: Align with the business on dollars spent on infrastructure overhead per engineer.

tl;dr: “WebCore is part of a strategy to re-imagine BBC Online and create a single website for all the digital services.” Graeme covers how the engineering team: 1) Went about re-organizing for success. 2) Viewed the team topologies and interaction modes between teams. 3) Viewed the role of the platform in enabling teams to interact with one another.

tl;dr: Julien highlights some of the challenges: “Weird” album names, albums without names, confusing names, long tracks up to 23 hours, tracks with different versions and more. Julien also links to the DB schema to show how to “tame this madness.”

tl;dr: “Something I found hilarious is that a variable might be used on lines 200-210 and then again on line 8544. No where else.”

tl;dr: “If you have a teammate coming to you questioning their worth and effectiveness, I want to equip you with a framework that will help this teammate recognize their successes and impact.” Lara discusses the BICEPS framework that covers: Improvement, Choice, Equality / Fairness, Predictability and Significance. As well as some questions you can ask your teammate e.g. In the last year, where have you created more clarity or predictability for people?

tl;dr: “One of the things that I catch myself doing more and more as a staff engineer is to help individuals, teams or sometimes the organization reach clarity. I’m no oracle and this is not rocket science but in this article I’d like to go meta and clarify the process of reaching clarity with some examples.”

tl;dr: “After reaching a certain level of seniority, it’s expected that a worker can self-direct in service of the organizational goals. This creates a situation that can be difficult to navigage: is it really self-direction if the organization decides what are the “right” and “wrong” choices in the end?”