tl;dr in tech by Joe Karlsson - Issue #44

In dumb personal news - I posted a video of me singing a song about corn in my car over the weekend on TikTok and it got 1.2 MILLION views. 

tl;dr: “Based on our findings above, the least viewed articles on Wikipedia are not going to be merely about topics with little popular interest - they must also be “unlucky” in the sense of having very small random gaps… Of these 600,000 least lucky articles, all received at least a few views in 2021. The booby prize for least popular article of 2021 is shared by two articles which received exactly 3 probably-human pageviews.”

tl;dr: “When an army has the force of momentum, even the timid become brave; when it loses the force of momentum, even the brave become timid.” Building momentum is about increasing velocity - speed and direction. Leading is about increasing: 1) confidence in the direction i.e. vision, planning, strategy. 2) speed at which you’re moving i.e. execution. Paulo discusses practical ways to achieve momentum.

tl;dr: Reasons include:

1) It removes redundancy because the function name should already be in the call stack.

2) It is falsifiable i.e. a person reviewing the test can decide to which degree the name agrees with the actual test.

3) Encourages testing one property of the function per test.

tl;dr: “If positive engineering is taken to mean the day-to-day work that engineers do to deliver productive, expected outcomes, then negative engineering is the insurance that protects those outcomes by defending them from an infinity of possible failures.” Jeremiah discusses the impact on productivity.

tl;dr:

1) The network is reliable

2) Latency is zero

3) Bandwidth is infinite

4) The network is secure

5) Topology doesn’t change

6) There is one administrator

7) Transport cost is zero

8) The network is homogeneous.

tl;dr: “I was 6-months into my first real developer job, trying to fix a bug. Our application would sometimes insert rows with an invalid “foreign key.” Of course, the bug was only seen in production, so I had a production MySQL shell open to see the bad rows.”

tl;dr: You want to “check that this person has internalized the feedback and will begin to make changes.”

1) Ask them if they understand the feedback and urgency.

2) Intentionally create space and pauses to give them time to respond.

3) Ask them to reflect back what they heard.

4) Ask open coaching questions e.g. “okay, given this feedback, what are you planning on changing to be able to meet these expectations?”

5) Identify next steps.

tl;dr: The impulse to pretend that nothing has happened is understandable, it carries a cost: You may actually heighten your embarrassment and distress. Instead, by acknowledging and addressing your embarrassment, you:

1) Diminish your embarrassment and the resulting distress.

2) Clarify the situation, restore consistency to your self-presentation, and reduce others’ anxiety.

3) Role model a productive response to unwelcome events.

tl;dr: “While not commenting event calls is usually not a big deal, it may be a problem in situations like mine where I had to go over many ambiguous use cases at once. This resulted in a lot of wasted time that could be otherwise avoided if the original author added a comment.”