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 #34

colored pencil lined up on top of white surface

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

I was in the park with my son and his best friend. I saw 2 missed calls from a number I didn’t recognise. I Googled it - it was my bank. I told the other adults that I should call back in case it was important.

tl;dr: “While DALL-E 2 can perform a variety of tasks, including image manipulation and interpolation as mentioned above, we will focus on the task of image generation in this article.”

tl;dr: A URI is a string that identifies a resource. From a syntactical point of view, a URI string mostly follows the same format as the URL. A URN identifies resources in a permanent way, even after that resource does not exist anymore.

tl;dr: “The purpose of a software team is to provide valued capabilities to customers, internal or external. To do that, our software has to be up, it has to be fast enough, usable enough - a whole slew of properties that don’t show up in JIRA.” Jessica discusses 5 key properties - Availability, Security, Flow, Delight and Value - their measures, and questions they prompt.

tl;dr: “Use feature requests as a breeding ground for the next generation of the system’s architecture. By continuously evaluating what we are being asked to change, we can jump the gun and get to the next level faster and often more safely.”

As we emerge from the pandemic, employees are looking for more substantial offers that drive real value at the workplace. Will tech companies step up?

tl;dr: “Imagine discovering a serious bug in production immediately after releasing your game. Imagine this bug hurts only your paying customers. Imagine it freezes the game immediately after players complete in-app purchases… This is the worst bug I have ever dealt with in 30 years of programming. This is a story of how we tracked it down and worked with Unity to fix it.”

tl;dr: “No one argues that, when trying to improve something, we don’t often subtract. We pile on “to-dos” when we really need “to-stops,” or create incentives for good behavior … but don’t get rid of obstacles to it.” People think first about adding and, as a result, systematically overlook subtractive changes.