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 #46

red and black abstract illustration

Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

Today I will share some of the software engineering soft skills I have learned from my first 10 years on Google Chrome, where I am a Senior Staff Engineering…

tl;dr:

1) Fork this template.

2) If there are any sections that don’t resonate with you, remove or edit them.

3) Fill in the sections. Feel free to jump around to answer the parts that you have the most energy for.

4) Revisit a few days later: is there anything you want to change?

5) If possible, find peers to discuss each others checkups together.

6) Review a year from now.

tl;dr: Recommendations include:

1) Onboard as fast as possible.

2) Make upgrading easy: “when making a major version change, limit the blast radius of changes to make it easy for folks to update dependencies.”

3) Helpful error messages: “when applicable, include hyperlinks in error messages to provide more context on how to solve the error.” And more.

tl;dr: “The 26M rps DDoS attack originated from a small but powerful botnet of 5,067 devices. On average, each node generated approximately 5,200 rps at peak. To contrast the size of this botnet, we’ve been tracking another much larger but less powerful botnet of over 730,000 devices.”

tl;dr: “There are two projects, both deemed important by the business, and both need a UI developer. Unfortunately, only one UI developer is available. Why not let the UI developer split time across both projects?” Ben explains why this doesn’t work using the equation: Productive Time = Total Time - Overhead.

tl;dr: I would discover a bug or something would break my workflow with a new release and I would head to GitHub to report it… What I didn’t consider was that my interactions were taking time & attention from the project. User support is a cost. If you take anything away from this post I hope it is that these costs need to be paid by someone, the maintainer.”