2012

Mike Hearn's talk at the 2012 London Bitcoin Conference on the future of Bitcoin, new applications and rebuilding the banking system. He covers lesser-known protocol features such as contracts, escrow and scripting.

Aaron Swartz's keynote at Freedom to Connect 2012 describing how ordinary people helped defeat the SOPA censorship bill. He recounts how the Senate unexpectedly united behind the bill and how grassroots action stopped it.

Rob Pike's Google I/O 2012 talk shows how goroutines and channels solve tricky concurrency problems with simple Go code. It features a playful goroutine demo with gophers passing messages and a search engine example.

Rich Hickey's keynote at RailsConf 2012, a close sibling of his 'Simple Made Easy' talk. He distinguishes simple (not intertwined) from easy (familiar), and argues that software complexity comes from complecting things, with Rails-specific examples including large gem collections.

Martin Fowler's GOTO 2012 introduction to NoSQL databases: where they came from, their data models, how consistency thinking differs, and when to use them. He argues they won't make relational databases obsolete and introduces polyglot persistence.

Dr. Richard Cook, a physician and patient safety researcher, presents his ideas on how complex systems fail, at Velocity 2012. He argues for designing for resiliency rather than trying to exhaustively handle every failure mode.

Russell Barkley gives the keynote at UNC's 2012 Burnett Seminar on ADHD. He presents it as an executive function disorder and discusses its effects and how to help.

Locksport historian Schuyler Towne's RVASec 2012 talk on why people lock their doors, tracing the history of locks and the assumptions about security behind them.

A 2012 Fortune dinner debate between Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt over whether technological progress is healthy or stalling and whether Google can still innovate.

Yehuda Katz's Railsberry 2012 talk on why Rails is hard to learn and use. He explains that the framework's many features reflect real complexity in web applications that newcomers do not yet see.

A dotJS 2012 conference talk by Fat (of Twitter Bootstrap fame) on what open source really means and why maintainers feel guilty about it. It covers the obligations, expectations and burnout that come with releasing popular open source software, delivered with humor.

Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software and StackExchange, speaks at Y Combinator's Startup School in 2012. He shares his perspective on building startups.

Matt Wynne's GoRuCo 2012 talk on why Rails apps get hard to change as they grow, and how a ports-and-adapters hexagonal architecture separates application logic from the framework.

A VPRO documentary following ecologist and cameraman John D. Liu. He documents the regreening of China's Loess Plateau and other efforts to restore deserts and biodiversity around the world.

A BBC Four documentary following Alan Bond and Reaction Engines as they pursue the Skylon spaceplane and its SABRE engine. It covers the history from HOTOL and the heat-exchanger breakthrough.

Pannenkoek2012's commentated tool-assisted Super Mario 64 run collecting the Watch for Rolling Rocks star with half an A press, using parallel universes and QPU movement. The video is marked outdated in favor of a newer version.

Karen Sandler's keynote at Linux.conf.au 2012 on the software running inside medical devices such as her own pacemaker-defibrillator. She discusses the difficulty of learning what code runs in life-sustaining devices and why open source matters there.

Dave Chinner's linux.conf.au 2012 talk on XFS scalability, covering pain points with large numbers of files and complex metadata, and the work to fix XFS metadata performance.

Matthew Garrett's linux.conf.au 2012 talk covers EFI and UEFI from the Linux point of view: why the PC BIOS was bad, what EFI changes, the issues it brings, and Secure Boot.

Rusty Russell and Matt Evans examine why Unix utilities like ls and cat grew from a few kilobytes to over a hundred kilobytes. They take apart common tools to see where the growth comes from.

Jim Weirich's RubyConf 2012 talk derives the Y combinator step by step, live-coding in Ruby lambdas. It builds up an understanding of functional programming and lambda calculus from first principles.

Bret Victor's talk at CUSEC 2012 in which he argues that creators need immediate feedback and should organize their work around a guiding principle. He demonstrates live-coding and animation tools that show results as you type, and describes his own principle that creators must see what they are making.

Rich Hickey's JaxConf 2012 keynote examines what values are and why immutable values matter as information systems grow more complex and data gets bigger. It contrasts places with values and builds the case for immutability.

Gary Bernhardt's RubyConf 2012 talk on testing in isolation without mocking everything. It goes through behavior versus data, mutation versus immutability, and how a functional core with an imperative shell yields natural isolation and parallelism.

Jack Diederich's PyCon 2012 talk argues that classes are overused in Python and walks through real code, refactoring away unnecessary classes, exceptions and modules. It popularized the heuristic that a class with two methods, one being __init__, should be a function.

Paul Graham's keynote at PyCon 2012, in which he talks about startup ideas and what kinds of companies are likely to matter in the future. He discusses ideas such as a better email client and a search engine for hackers, and argues for looking back at the present from the future.

Christopher Domas presents his Cantor Dust tool at Derbycon 2012, a 3D visual approach to reverse engineering binaries by visualizing their structure dynamically.

A standing whiteboard conversation at Lang.NEXT 2012 among Carl Hewitt, Erik Meijer and Clemens Szyperski about the actor model. Hewitt, who originated the model, explains its foundations.

Jason Scott's DerbyCon 2012 talk on rescuing the Prince of Persia source code from old floppy disks, working with the game's author Jordan Mechner. It is a story of digital archaeology and recovering data from ancient media.

A Channel 9 conversation recorded at GOTO 2012 between Anders Hejlsberg (TypeScript) and Lars Bak (Dart). They discuss the two languages and different approaches to making JavaScript development safer, including runtime type checking.

Timothy Cain's 2012 GDC postmortem of the original Fallout, covering how he helped build the game and set the template for open-world RPGs. He talks through production, design and programming decisions.

Smalltalk pioneer Dan Ingalls presents the Lively Kernel at JSConf US 2012, a live, direct-manipulation programming environment running in the browser. He shows drag-and-drop building of live objects on the web.

A PyCon 2012 talk by Kurt Grandis on building an automated water-squirting turret that uses Python and computer vision to detect and drive off squirrels from a bird feeder.

Ned Batchelder's PyCon 2012 talk gives a quick overview of what Unicode is, then focuses on what a Python programmer needs to handle text correctly. It presents the 'Unicode sandwich' strategy: decode bytes at input, work with Unicode internally, encode at output.

Sam Harris's talk at the 2012 Global Atheist Convention on the secular attitude toward death and living in the present moment, with a guided meditation element.

Bryan Cantrill's talk on corporate open source anti-patterns, first given at FISL 2012 and again at the Liferay Symposium. He lays out the mistakes companies make when open sourcing code, such as announcing future open sourcing, and discusses licenses.

A PyCon 2012 talk by early YouTube engineer Mike Solomon on how YouTube scaled its architecture, which is mostly Python.

Kevin Rose interviews Elon Musk in 2012 about his companies PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla. It includes Musk's short explanation of reasoning from first principles versus by analogy.

Joel Spolsky's 2012 Google tech talk on the cultural anthropology of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. He explains how the software was designed to shape community norms and curation standards.

Urs Hoelzle, Google's SVP of infrastructure, gives the 2012 Open Networking Summit keynote on how Google adopted OpenFlow and software-defined networking in its own networks. The slides are linked in the description.