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 #60

tl;dr: “Your language isn’t broken, it’s doing floating point math. Computers can only natively store integers, so they need some way of representing decimal numbers. This representation is not perfectly accurate. This is why, more often than not, 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3.”

tl;dr: “Ever had hiring manager’s remorse? It’s where you regret hiring someone immediately after they start. It could be that you don’t like their face, or just want to see the world burn. Worse, they might have mentioned they like jazz. Whatever the reason, this post is here to help you make them quit on their own by picking the worst starter project for them.”

tl;dr: “As the system evolves to solve more and more use cases, we have expanded its scope to handle not only the CDC use cases but also more general data movement and processing use cases:”

1) Events can be sourced from more generic applications.

2) Catalog of available DB connectors is growing.

3) More processing patterns such as filter, projection, union, join, etc…

tldr: Amir gives tips for how to assign great first projects to your new teammates:

1) Starter tasks, not starter projects

2) Let them work on the core business, the bread-and-butter for your team

3) Tasks should be as self-contained as possible

4) Learn from past mistakes

5) Pick a mentor, but make sure everyone on the team is approachable

6) Proactively offer help

tldr: Daily curated list of jobs that allow working from anywhere.

tl;dr: “You don’t touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic’ and ‘more magic’. The switch was in the ‘more magic’ position.”

tl;dr: “It is absolutely possible to return after a few years away. And yeah, you could come back as a principal or staff engineer. Someone will definitely hire you. However, I suggest otherwise. I suggest you come back as a senior engineer, writing software every day, for a good 6-9 months. Your grounding in the technical challenges and solution space will be much deeper and richer if you come back hands on than if you came in at a higher level…”

tl;dr: “At some point in your career you stop looking for jobs and start looking for holes that are shaped like you.” Molly discusses 4 tools that can help guide decision-making

1) A love-good-hate-bad venn diagram.

2) The stool analogy.

3) The dating metaphor.

4) Imagining your day, each discussed here.