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 #61

tl;dr: “A computer scientist was writing a column about Literate Programming - one of Knuth’s ideas on how documentation and code should live side-by-side. So he asked both Knuth and McIlroy to write a program: “Given a text file and integer k, print the k most common words in the file - and the number of their occurrences - in decreasing frequency.”

tl;dr: “I created Papers, Please in 2013 specifically for desktop computers with mouse control. Now, here, in 2022, desktop computers no longer exist and all computing is done via handheld mobile telephone. Time to update this dinosaur.”

tl;dr: “In this blog post, we discuss the rideshare pricing system architectural design, modeling approaches and potential future iterations of Lyft’s pricing engine to illustrate how we tackle price optimization to achieve Lyft’s long-term mission.”

tl;dr: “With luck you shouldn’t have to build or maintain a streaming system yourself. Your company should have infrastructure to help you with this. However, understanding where streaming is useful and why streaming is hard could help you evaluate the right tools and allocate sufficient resources for your needs.”

tl;dr: “The thing that grabbed me here is that rituals create a sense of belonging. You show that you belong to the group by participating in the ritual… It seems especially relevant these days when so many of us are atomized and physically separated from our teammates. That ineffable sense of belonging can make all the difference between a job that you do and a role that feeds your soul.” Charity provides examples from various teams.

tl;dr: “In this post we will share our approach to building out KPI trees for our platform engineering teams… Starting with the product development process, we will explain how we shaped our platform vision, resulting in a set of actionable KPIs that we use to identify our biggest problems and continuously measure our platform’s performance.”

tl;dr: “This website is dedicated to cataloguing types of linguistic antipatterns and discussing the deeper reasons they cause problems and how to fix them.”

tl;dr: Julia’s goal is to spend approximately 0% of time on ongoing operations for “tiny unimportant websites,” writing a program that does 3 things:

1) An uptime checker.

2) An end-to-end healthcheck.

3) Automatically restart if the healthcheck fails.