#2 Beauty of TL;DR 📝
As someone who frequently writes at work (other than coding), I always aim to summarise and highlight key points for relevant stakeholders to ensure my message is clear. However, I often find myself needing to address multiple points and expand on some of them for only a subset of the stakeholders. For example, when sharing an update on a security issue with our deployed software service, I want to briefly highlight what's relevant to non-tech professionals while also providing in-depth details for developers who want to understand the issue more thoroughly. Providing summaries is essential for business, especially for leadership. This is where the idea of TL;DR comes in handy.
TL;DR stands for "Too Long; Didn't Read." It's an acronym commonly used in the software and tech industry to indicate a short version of a longer document or message, offering a quick summary for those who may not have the time (or patience) to read the full text.
This approach is incredibly effective. Why? Because it allows your readers to quickly grasp the essence of the message without scanning through the entire document, making communication more time-efficient and clear. If part of your job involves reading numerous documents, wouldn’t it be nice to decide whether the full version is worth your time or if the summary suffices?
TL;DR sections are typically placed at the top or beginning of a document or message. There are no strict rules on what a TL;DR should contain—it can be a summarised paragraph or two, or even just a few bullet points.
Here are some examples of a TL;DR:
TL;DR: 🚀 We just deployed a fix for the API bug that was causing
500
errors on the/user-profile
endpoint. The issue was due to a null pointer exception when handling certain user data. The fix is live, and everything should be working smoothly now.TL;DR: 🐍 We've released a fix for the bug in our X library that was caused by an outdated version of the
pandas
library.Deployment X is now live 🎉
TL;DR: Service X was causing timeouts due to excessive user requests on a single pod. For more details, read the following document.
TL;DRs are common nowadays. If your team doesn’t use them, introduce the practice. It will help improve their messaging and overall communication skills. The more you read TL;DRs, the more you’ll appreciate having them, especially if you’re in a leadership role where you need to gather updates from multiple teams.
TL;DR Exercise
Let's try a fun exercise. I'll share an technical update with you, and we'll work together to write a TL;DR for it. Here we go!
In our recent deployment, we encountered an issue with the asynchronous task handling in our Flask application. The Celery worker processes were not properly reconnecting to the Redis message broker after a network interruption, leading to task failures and delays. This issue was traced back to a misconfiguration in the Celery retry policy, which was set to a default value that did not account for extended network outages. To resolve this, we updated the retry policy to include exponential backoff with a maximum retry limit, ensuring that worker processes can better handle temporary disruptions. We also added monitoring alerts to notify the team of any future reconnection issues, allowing for quicker response times.
Your TL;DR
Pause for a minute. How would you summarise this in a 1-2 bullet-point summary?
YOUR TL;DR SAMPLE
Let me share with you my sample:
Deployment is now stable. TL;DR:
🛠️ Fixed Celery worker reconnection issues to Redis after network interruptions by updating the retry policy with exponential backoff.
🔔 Added monitoring alerts for quicker team response to future reconnection problems.
What do you think? Short and sweet, right? If you managed to capture the keywords like network interruptions, Celery, Redis, retry policy, and monitoring—that’s perfect!
Conclusion
TL;DRs are great, and I hope I’ve convinced you to advocate for using them in your work. If you’ve already been doing this for a while, I probably should have put a TL;DR at the top of this post, right?
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