You are reading my blog, that’s great! What is this blog about? (For the TL;DR, just scroll to the end.)

About TL;DR dev blog

Today’s blogosphere, free and commercial MOOC learning platforms offer a massive often deliver high quality articles, tutorials, videos or whole projects for you to learn about your core technology or new topics. Keeping up is nontrivial. And let’s not forget about podcasts.

In my daily routine, I often wished to have more time to listen any of the many podcasts. Listening to dev talks during commute (on my bicycle) didn’t quite work for me. To really get the content, I might have to pause and replay a section, want to take notes to get back to specific points later. Video playback speed can only be increased so much without losing the context at some point and the same problems I’m having with the podcasts arise.

For me, there’s always more intersting things to bookmark than I can swallow in the time I have. Sounds familiar? Wouldn’t it be great to have some resource that would deliver a short but concise recap of the content? Something that’s technical enough to grasp the core ideas and contributions but so short you can get it in minutes rather than hours. (I found it funny that at a similar time a now very successful startup came around with the same idea applied to books!) Something that gives you an informed idea and lets you decide if it’s worth your time or not to visit the original source. I like articles that give me a TL;DR at some point to let me decide exactly this.

And then there’s the following aspect: I heard it, read it, watched it. What then? What did I really get out of it? It’s no secret that new knowledge settles much better if applied in a context, be it writing or teaching about it or building something. You will instantly notice gaps. Then you revisit, ask, try something, play, digest. That’s when you learn.

Its name, TL;DR dev blog, stems from the idea to write short articles for anywone interested in reading my short version of some content but – more importantly – for me to revisit topics and work on them.

I didn’t come very far with that yet, only one episode of one of my favorite C++ sources, C++ weekly. As I feared, writing a TL;DR about the episode opened new questions and took much longer than anticipated. But in the end it was done. I found the experience useful and will try to continue. Even if it takes precious time that’s missing for consuming other things.

The main reason I only did one post about C++ weekly is that I started a web development project shortly after initiating this blog. I’m doing this to learn JavaScript and related topics which I currently prioritize over C++. Being primarily C++ developer with love for backend and cloud technologies, this seems to be a logical step for me. There’s no point in denying that JavaScript is the language of the web. I’ll be blogging about it to revisit what I did (and challenge it) and to inform the interested reader about what the project is about, what decisions are made at certain steps and explain technicalities.

The TL;DR

• I often wished for a good resource to write the useful essence (for me) of an interesting article or video to save my time. This is was the core idea of the blog.
• Writing my own articles shall improve my understanding of the topic.
• I also hope it will improve my technical writing skills.
• Diverging from the original idea, I’m now also writing about my project(s) that, like the TL;DR-ing, I do to improve my skills.
• I’m glad you’re here! Feel free to contact me per email or send me a tweet or twitter DM.