/Entertaining

TypeScript Types Can Run DOOM

tl;dr: The project involved 3.5 trillion lines of types, totaling 177 terabytes, and took 12 days of continuous processing to render the first frame. It was a year-long journey of 18-hour days, requiring custom tools, thousands of tests, and deep programming knowledge. The result is likely the largest TypeScript codebase ever created.

featured in #595

"A Calculator App? Anyone Could Make That"

- Chad Nauseam tl;dr: “A calculator should show you the result of the mathematical expression you entered. That's much, much harder than it sounds. What I'm about to tell you is the greatest calculator app development story ever told.”

featured in #592

I Just Crossed $1 Million On GitHub Sponsors

- Caleb Porzio tl;dr: First, here's a quick recap of my open source journey: 5 years ago, I left my day job with no plan. 5 days later, I started working on an open source project called Livewire. 1 year later I started another project: Alpine.js. Within 2 years I had made a GitHub sponsors account and ramped it up to $100k/yr. Ever since I've been working on those same two projects and selling stuff along the way to fund my work on them.

featured in #547

What Could You Create If You Had 30 Minutes To Plan And 4 Hours To Build?

tl;dr: Grab your popcorn and take a 30 minute break from your day to watch four developers compete by planning and building an app that to help protect the community from monsters — in under 5 hours. Which developer will save us?

featured in #546

The 1 Hour Per Year Bug (But Only In Pacific Time!)

- Tomer Aberbach tl;dr: “The date was November 8, 2021 and I was a bug triager on the Google Docs team. That day began like any other. I made myself some coffee and started looking through bug reports from the day before. But then something caught my eye.”

featured in #543

"We Ran Out Of Columns" - The Best, Worst Codebase

- Jimmy Miller tl;dr: “My first job was a trial by fire, to this day, that codebase remains the worst and the best codebase I ever had the pleasure of working in. While the codebase will forever remain locked by proprietary walls of that particular company, I hope I can share with you some of its most fun and scary stories.”

featured in #538

The Many Lives Of Null Island

- Alan McConchie tl;dr: “At risk of ruining the secret for you, Null Island is a long-running inside joke among cartographers. It is an imaginary island located at a real place: the coordinates of 0º latitude and 0º longitude, a location in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa where the Prime Meridian meets the Equator, hundreds of miles from any real dry land.” 

featured in #536

The Story Of Reformatting 100k Files At Google In 2012

- Laurent Le Brun tl;dr: “Back in September 2012, I was a junior engineer at Google, working on Google’s build tool, also known internally as Blaze. One day, a mysterious calendar invite landed in my inbox. It was sent by two engineers in the US, and I was invited along with my team lead. I quickly recognized the names: Rob Pike and Russ Cox.”

featured in #524

Reverse The List Of Integers

- Arthur O’Dwyer tl;dr: Reverse a list of distinct positive integers using two types of moves: splitting a number into two parts that sum to the whole, or combining two adjacent numbers into their sum. The goal is to reverse the list without creating numbers greater than the original list's maximum or duplicating any elements. The challenge is to find the optimal sequence of moves.

featured in #509

My Favorite Math Jokes

- Tanya Khovanova tl;dr: “For many years, I have been collecting math jokes and posting them on my website. I have more than 400 jokes there. In this paper, which is an extended version of my talk at the G4G15, I would like to present 66 of them.”

featured in #497