2011

Paul Irish and Pavel Feldman present the newest Chrome Dev Tools features at Google I/O 2011, including live CSS editing, saving changes, breakpoints and network analysis. It also covers remote debugging.

Rich Hickey's Strange Loop 2011 keynote distinguishing 'simple' (not intertwined) from 'easy' (familiar or near at hand). It argues that software complexity comes from complecting things and that we should pick simple constructs.

Robert C. Martin's Ruby Midwest 2011 keynote argues that software architecture should express the application's intent rather than its framework. He covers separating entities, interactors and boundaries so the web, database and framework are details.

Rich Hickey's Strange Loop 2011 keynote separates 'simple' (not intertwined) from 'easy' (familiar or near at hand) and argues that software complexity comes from complecting things. It offers a vocabulary for judging designs and abstractions.

Moxie Marlinspike's BlackHat 2011 talk examines weaknesses of SSL and the certificate authority system and proposes Convergence, a decentralized notary approach with trust agility.

Gerald Sussman's 2011 Strange Loop keynote argues we still do not know how to compute, comparing biological systems with how we program machines. It touches on propagators, constraint programming and robustness.

David Crane, designer of Pitfall for the Atari 2600, gives a GDC 2011 postmortem on the game's design challenges. He covers how he fit a large world into the console's tiny memory. The session ends with Q&A.

Salman Khan's TED 2011 talk on Khan Academy. He shows that it goes beyond video lectures to self-paced practice and analytics for teachers, and argues for filling gaps in understanding.

Travis Kalanick's talk at FailCon 2011 about his earlier failed startups, given as a case study before Uber's rise. It describes lessons from those ventures.

John Carmack's keynote at QuakeCon 2011, an hour and a half of wide-ranging talk about id Software, Rage, engine open-sourcing, patents and programming practices.

Chuck Moore, creator of Forth, gives his annual Fireside Chat at Forth Day 2011 at Stanford. He talks about his multi-core GreenArrays chip design and demonstrates code running on it.

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, presents Duolingo at TEDxCMU 2011. The idea is to have millions of people translate the web for free while learning a language, an example of human computation.

Josh Bloch and Jeremy Manson present the eighth installment of Java Puzzlers at Google I/O 2011, a set of surprising corner cases in the Java language and libraries. It includes puzzlers on traps such as regular expression performance.

Google I/O 2011 session by Ray Cromwell and Philip Rogers on writing 2D and 3D games with HTML5 and GWT. It covers porting game libraries and physics engines, sharing code with Android, and publishing to the Chrome Web Store, and showcases the ForPlay library.

A four-minute Velocity 2011 talk in which Artur Bergman, then at Wikia, argues bluntly and with profanity that SSDs should replace spinning disks in servers.

Amazon's Jon Jenkins at Velocity 2011 on how operations can drive revenue and on Amazon's highly available, autonomous architectures. It includes details on deployment frequency and Amazon's move to AWS.

Eben Moglen's 2011 Personal Democracy Forum talk on the loss of anonymity and privacy on the internet. He proposes building an alternative net of personal servers, the idea behind FreedomBox.

Aaron Patterson's RailsConf 2011 talk on Rails 3.1 performance, showing why deeper Rack middleware stacks slow Rails and how a shallower pipeline helps. It also touches on Rack API design.

Steve Yegge's OSCON Data 2011 talk imagines what you could do with Google-scale storage and compute a decade later. He argues smart people should work on hard problems such as biology rather than cat pictures, and the talk ends with a moment many took as him quitting Google.

A Google I/O 2011 talk by Andrew Gerrand and Rob Pike on building and deploying a web application in Go. It argues that Go offers speed, reliability and simplicity together.

Bryan Cantrill of Joyent describes the experience of porting KVM to SmartOS, an Illumos-based OS, at KVM Forum 2011. He covers the process, the pain points and how DTrace helped.

Lennart Augustsson's CUFP 2011 keynote covers using Haskell commercially at Standard Chartered Bank. He discusses non-standard Haskell implementations, including a strict dialect, and weighs strict against lazy evaluation.

Karen Sandler, then Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, talks at OSCON 2011 about the risks of proprietary, closed-source software in implanted medical devices like her own pacemaker-defibrillator.

Rob Pike shows how the Go text/template lexer is built, using state functions, goroutines and channels. The talk was given at a Google Technology User Group in Sydney in 2011.

Justice Antonin Scalia's opening statement at a 2011 Senate Judiciary hearing on the role of judges. He argues that the Constitution's separation of powers is what protects liberty, and that gridlock is by design.

Gary Taubes presents the argument of his book Why We Get Fat to Googlers in 2011. He claims the type of calories matters more than the count, challenges calories-in-calories-out thinking and criticizes the low-fat dietary consensus.

Cliff Click of Azul Systems asks what a JVM is supposed to do, in a Google Tech Talk from 2011. He covers the services a JVM provides, such as garbage collection and compilation, and the messy reality beneath the abstractions.

Bungie's David Aldridge explains the networking programming behind Halo: Reach in a 2011 GDC session. It covers how gameplay stays in sync online, including forecasting and state reconciliation.

Lawrence Lessig's 2011 Berkeley book talk based on Republic, Lost, arguing that money in politics creates institutional corruption in Congress. He calls it his favorite version of the talk.

Ricardo Signes' YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2011 talk on the legends and horrors of email: how messy the SMTP and email standards are in practice. The first few minutes are Perl-specific, but the rest applies to anyone handling email.

Eric Chahi's GDC 2011 postmortem of Another World (Out of This World), describing how he built the game. He shows his polygon art approach, rotoscoping and animation tools.

Gary Bernhardt's Cascadia Ruby Conference 2011 talk on using the Unix shell for practical problem solving. He builds pipelines interactively by iterative refinement, using small tools as levers.

Part 2 of the IROS 2011 keynote by Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson on Google's self-driving car. It shows how the car perceives its surroundings with a lidar point cloud and recognizes traffic lights and pedestrians. The audio is poor because it was recorded on a pocket camcorder.

David Crane's 2011 GDC postmortem of Pitfall, the classic Atari 2600 game. He explains how he created the game under the severe hardware limits of the console.

Steve Hsu's 2011 Google Tech Talk reviews psychometric measurement of intelligence and the heritability of adult IQ, then discusses genome-wide association studies seeking the genes behind cognitive ability.

Douglas Crockford's YUIConf 2011 keynote on why programming style matters, particularly in JavaScript. He draws on science about the brain and shows how tools like JSLint help.

A talk given at the 2011 Nammour Symposium at Sacramento State arguing that past generations were wrong about nearly everything, so we should expect to be wrong too. It tours the many surprising ways scientific beliefs have failed, drawing on pessimistic induction.

Steve Jobs presents Apple's proposal for a new campus to the Cupertino City Council in June 2011, answering council members' questions about the plan.