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 #43

blue circuit board

Photo by Umberto on Unsplash

tl;dr: Airbnb went through this process by implementing the following practices:

1) Provide infrastructure as code to improve developer’s productivity.

2) Clarify ownership and improve with tooling & observability.

3) Define a new architecture supported by organization & methods.

4) Lead a deprecation working group to accelerate the migration. Antoine discusses how each was solved.

tl;dr: “If I didn’t have something like Heroku in my life I doubt that my career would be the same or even I would be the same person I am today. It’s really hard to describe what having access to a platform that lets you turn ideas into production quality code does to your output ability. ” The author also worked on the product at Salesforce. “I ended up working there and when I did I understood why Heroku had fallen so much.”

tl;dr: Murat committed to asking “crazier” left-field questions in each post he wrote. After 70 posts, he learned that these:

1) Are useful as they took him out of “default mode.”

2) Keep the brain more engaged. We tend to ask easier questions. Harder ones feel uncomfortable or seem impolite.

3) By calling them “MAD” questions, they give him the license to be more uninhibited.

tl;dr:

1) Launch a bounty program so any employee that encounters a policy or process hindering their ability to deliver value can submit it with a recommendation.

2) Practice continuous governance so individuals have the power to recommend changes to their own roles.

3) Don’t rush to a policy and process for everything as there can be an efficiency cost to keeping things open-ended.

tl;dr: “Have you ever wondered how real-time games can keep multiple clients in sync even when there are large latencies between users? How can you see other players reacting to your actions near instantly, in spite of the fact that the communication between your computer and the server is not instant?

tl;dr: “We are going to ask our employees to be in the office a maximum of 25% of their time. For the balance of that time, employees can be wherever they want, either in or out of the office. We really want to earn employee’s in-office time and be incredibly intentional about when we ask folks to travel.”

tl;dr: “I didn’t really care what the area code was, so removing the params should make it easier to find a number I liked. I wrote a quick script to repeatedly call the API and try and find a number with at least 3 consecutive numbers.”