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 #40

tl;dr: “In this article, I will present a new puzzle game and demonstrate techniques I used to write a fast, practical solver for it. Topics covered will include breadth-first/A* search, memoization, optimization, and strategies specific to NP-hard and NP-complete puzzle games.”

tl;dr: “Everything I know and learned about running and maintaining OS projects for three decades. I have been actively involved in OS development since the early 1990s when I discovered the phenomenon of people writing source code they give away freely for others to use and modify under a certain license.”

tl;dr: “One of the fun examples among all the copyright fuss is the extreme example of copyright claims made by AT&T some time in the 1980s. It’s the /bin/true program. This is a “dummy” program whose function is to make it easy to write infinite loops in shells scripts. The program does nothing; it merely exits with a zero exit status… But AT&T’s lawyers decided that this was worthy of copyright protection.”

tl;dr: Lara lists recently published resources for managing in a time of crises, including “Managering through terrible times,” “Handling the emotional weight of 1:1s” and “When your manager isn’t supporting you, build a Voltron.” Additionally listed are resources to build resilience and tactical templates.

tl;dr: “When faced with a choice, always pick the simplest thing that solves your immediate problem. Then make sure you can change your mind later. By the simplest thing I mean the solution that is easiest to reason about.”

tl;dr: Adam discusses the difference between line and staff software engineers, where a line engineer is core to the mission and staff is a supporting role. Although roles can be similar in either context, this variable is important to consider as it will directly impact your experience. Adam outlines how, as well as pros and cons of both.