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 #64

3x3 Rubik's cube toy

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

tl;dr: “Hybrid work only works when all employees are treated as remote employees. To do this, companies need to do five things: embrace asynchronous communication, make communication boundaries clear, champion documentation and the production of artifacts, share information widely, and provide the right tools for employees to succeed.” Each are discussed in this post.

tl;dr: “We were releasing breaking changes almost monthly with different sunset dates - making it hard for developers to test and plan their roadmap without a predictable release schedule. Unversioned APIs also blocked customers from accessing the latest features and caused internal challenges with new feature development.” Nihit’s discusses how his team set out to build API versioning for LinkedIn Marketing APIs.

tl;dr: “Having a smaller website makes it load faster - that’s not surprising. What is surprising is that a 14kB page can load much faster than a 15kB page - maybe 612ms faster - while the difference between a 15kB and a ;16kB page is trivial. This is because of the TCP slow start algorithm. This article will cover what that is, how it works, and why you should care. But first we’ll quickly go over some of the basics.”

tl;dr: “Dealing with money in software is difficult and dangerous. This post contains an overview of the problems you will run into eventually when writing software that deals with money. It describes potential representations, relevant trade-offs, and recommends ways of correctly implementing common operations. The post is prescriptive, so that you can use it to write your own library for dealing with amounts of money.”

tl;dr: “Terminology matters and we can do better than 10x. We can be specific. Skills are not homogeneous, and people can quickly improve their craft as long as we don’t treat talent like some mythical quality.”

tl;dr: “We’ve got distributions of a Go package that includes entirely unlicensed code. We’ve got a host of Go packages that may not be complying with the terms of the license, when the distributions can even agree what the license is. And it’s apparently not limited to just go. Is this normal? Is this legal? I don’t really know.”

tl;dr: The bill is designed to further support engineering managers at Honeycomb, with the following guidelines:

1) Create a culture of respect for both management and IC work, due to the increasing “disdain” managers are facing.

2) Provide a career path within management with multiple ways to advance.

3) Be straight with teams about what managers are there to do.

4) Cultivate the flow of feedback in both directions, between managers and IC.

5) Allow manager & IC compensation to move independently with the market.

tl;dr: “Imagine two people - Person A acknowledges the complex problem, and focuses. Person B doesn’t see the complex problem, and simplifies.” Both approaches may seem very similar at first glance. “Focus looks like simplification. Simplification looks like focus.” But when things go wrong, as they tend to do, Person B will make bad decisions. They’ll pick bad strategies and tactics and spread the lack of context awareness to their team.