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 #39

tl;dr: “Note that the code should be taken as a twisted joke, or as an exercise in minimalism, or as both, probably a joke. Because of the aforementioned limitations, we are going to write some nasty macros to perform bitwise operations, use global variables, reuse the same counter, etc. This is not a good example of readable or elegant code.”

tl;dr: “I find the absolute best way to understand a concept is to visualize it. I’ve built a regex engine using Python and Graphviz that animates what actually goes on when a regex is searching through a body of text. If you want to try out your own examples, the project is publicly available on GitHub.”

tl;dr: “The moral of the story is that the best way to avoid bugs is to make them difficult to write. Ideally make bugs harder to write than correct code. defer and try-with-resources are “wrong by default” and require explicit work on behalf of the programmer to become correct.”

tl;dr: “Two years ago, frustrated with a long list of unfulfilled project ideas in my phone notes, I decided to start trying one idea each week in its tiniest form. I never kept to a weekly schedule, but I’ve kept plodding along since then and launched 8 things. In this post I want to update you on everything I’ve launched, and share what I’ve learnt about building lots of these tiny internet projects.”

tl;dr: A set of attitudes leaders display while enacting these two roles. A warrior’s “purpose is overcoming resistance, where life is a series of battles,” where a Sage’s purpose is “learning and helping others learn, where, life is a series of mysteries to be studied.” Ed notes that the Warrior’s mindset becomes less useful as leaders grow more senior, and the Sage mindset increasingly important.

tl;dr:

1) Make time to be curious e.g. schedule 30 mins to jot down questions that spark curiosity.

2) Imagine you were the CEO and ask yourself how the business would work, and let your mind guide you through the web of questions a founder might ask.

3) Frame your career as a series of questions to create a sense of ownership of your career.

4) Try something new.

tl;dr: “Imagine there’s a city in a valley. On either side of the valley, there’s an army commanded by a general. On one side stands General Alice and her army. On the other, General Bob and his army. Alice and Bob want to capture the city, but neither has an army large enough to do so alone. Alice and Bob must attack at the same time, but Alice and Bob can only communicate by sending messengers through the valley, who have a chance of being captured by the city’s army. How do Alice and Bob coordinate their attack?”