2016

K Lars Lohn's PyCon 2016 keynote weaves together music theory, programming, biking road trips and fractals. It is a personal, wide-ranging talk rather than a Python how-to.

Jake Vanderplas's PyCon 2016 talk shows how sampling-based methods such as simulation, shuffling and bootstrapping make statistics intuitive. His pitch is that if you can write a for-loop, you can do statistics.

Brian Warner, author of magic-wormhole, presents the tool at PyCon 2016. He explains how a few secret words let two computers securely transfer files, covering the cryptography (NaCl, SPAKE2) and library use.

Cory Benfield's PyCon 2016 talk on building protocol libraries that can be reused widely, using the Python Hyper HTTP project as the example. He argues for separating protocol parsing from I/O.

Anthony Scopatz presents xonsh at PyCon 2016, a shell that is a superset of Python combining the best features of bash, zsh and fish. It covers rich history, tab completion, and how the language compiles to a Python AST.

Larry Hastings explains what Python's GIL is, what problems it solves and how it works, and presents his Gilectomy project to remove it, including the performance and C-extension obstacles.

Sam Stephenson's RailsConf 2016 talk on Turbolinks 5, showing how small teams can ship fast Rails apps in the browser and hybrid iOS and Android apps sharing one set of web views.

Jason Turner's CppCon 2016 talk builds a simple Commodore 64 game using C++17, showing how constexpr and const let a modern compiler produce tight 6502 code. He walks through assembly output to show abstractions being optimized away.

Martin Kleppmann's GOTO Berlin 2016 talk on how collaborative editors, offline apps, and multi-datacenter databases handle concurrent updates. It covers conflict resolution approaches including operational transformation and CRDTs, with a worked look at text CRDTs.

Chris Urmson's SXSW 2016 talk on Google's self-driving car project, covering 1.3 million self-driven miles and the gap between hype and reality. It shows sensor visualizations and playbacks of hard situations the cars met, and discusses failures such as the low-speed bus collision.

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2016 talk on how software engineers pass knowledge down through oral tradition, from folk rhymes to programmer lore and stories like why C lacks a logical XOR. He argues for writing software with future generations in mind.

A short !!Con 2016 talk by blind developer Sina Bahram on how he uses a computer and writes code with a screen reader at about 1,000 words per minute. He plays how common interfaces sound and challenges the audience to go a day using only the keyboard.

James Hamilton's Tuesday Night Live keynote at AWS re:Invent 2016, touring AWS infrastructure at scale including networking, power and custom silicon. It also features NASA JPL's Tom Soderstrom.

Cheng Lou's react-europe 2016 talk lays out a mental framework for thinking about abstraction levels in JavaScript tooling, from Angular and Grunt to Webpack and React. It uses that framework to reason about the cost of abstractions and how to choose between competing solutions.

Alex Russell's Chrome Dev Summit 2016 talk on building web experiences that work on slow, flaky networks and low-power devices. It argues developers should focus on the performance of real-world mobile hardware rather than desktop machines.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2016 talk on lifetime safety in C++, aiming for code free of leaks and dangling pointers by default. It covers smart pointers, ownership, reference counting pitfalls and deferred reclamation resembling garbage collection.

Nicholas Ormrod's CppCon 2016 talk on how Facebook optimizes std::string with its open-source replacement fbstring. It covers storage layout tradeoffs, small string optimization and memory allocation behavior.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2016 talk tries to defuse the heated debate over undefined behavior in C and C++. He explains from the compiler writer's perspective why UB exists and how it enables optimization.

Dan Saks's CppCon 2016 talk on why C programmers resist C++ and how to talk to them about it. He argues that persuasion rarely works by arguing and examines the culture gap between the two communities.

Tony Seba's 2016 keynote argues that batteries, electric vehicles, self-driving cars and solar will converge to disrupt energy and transportation. He predicts by 2030 all new vehicles will be electric and autonomous and that oil and other fossil fuels will be obsolete.

Brian Cardarella's RailsConf 2016 talk on why and how teams can move from Rails to Elixir and Phoenix. It covers performance gains without losing productivity and how to introduce Phoenix in an organization.

Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica presents at the 2016 Concordia Summit on using big data, psychographic profiling and behavioral microtargeting in elections.

Greg Kroah-Hartman's Git Merge 2016 talk on how the Linux kernel is developed, how fast it moves, and how git and email workflows keep it manageable. He is the stable kernel maintainer.

Rob Pike's GopherCon 2016 talk on the design of the Go assembler, explaining why Go uses a common assembly language translated to each architecture.

Raph Levien presents Xi editor at RustConf 2016, a high-performance text editor built in Rust. The talk goes into technical details, building polished GUI apps, and running a community-focused open source project.

A joint Erlang Factory 2016 keynote by Phoenix creator Chris McCord and Elm creator Evan Czaplicki on using the two together, including Phoenix.Presence design and PubSub optimizations.

Matt Ranney of Uber talks at GOTO Chicago 2016 about what Uber learned from growing past 1,000 production microservices. He covers regrets, sprawl and organizational effects.

Paul Irish's Chrome Dev Summit 2016 talk surveys the state of the art in Chrome DevTools debugging. It covers workspaces, diffs, CSS coverage, Node debugging, editor improvements and Lighthouse.

Keynote from the 2016 Dart Developer Summit introducing Flutter, Google's toolkit for building mobile apps from one codebase. It shows early demos aimed at native look and feel.

A HandmadeCon 2016 panel where Chris Hecker, John Miles, Sean Barrett and Chris Green give an oral history of software texture mapping in 90s games.

Andrei Alexandrescu's ACCU 2016 talk previews material from his book on writing fast code, with a focus on optimization techniques such as sentinels and faster search.

The day one keynote of Google Cloud's 2016 GCP NEXT conference, with Sundar Pichai, Diane Greene, Eric Schmidt, Urs Holzle and customers. It includes a Cloud ML demo by Jeff Dean.

A five-minute lightning talk from React.js Conf 2016 by Elie Rotenberg on protecting the DOM from tampering. It shows how React tree obfuscation (react-armor) can shuffle class names, tags and tree structure to defeat CSS-selector-based ad blocking.

A JuliaCon 2016 talk by Shashi Gowda showing an APL implementation in Julia. APL code is translated to Julia and JIT compiled to machine code.

Daniel Dunbar of Apple presents llbuild, a framework for building build systems, at the 2016 LLVM Developers' Meeting. He argues that the traditional way C compilers integrate with build systems limits compile speed, and proposes a new architecture.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2016 talk on designing hybrid data structures for performance. He covers cache locality, working-set size and allocation overhead, and why standard C++ containers fall short.

The 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, in which a panel of physicists and philosophers debates whether the universe is a simulation. Participants include David Chalmers, Zohreh Davoudi and James Gates.

Ben Alpert of the React team talks at React.js Conf 2016 about where React is heading. He covers performance and stability work, challenges at Facebook, and opportunities such as bringing React Native ideas to the web.

Guy Steele's JuliaCon 2016 keynote on the Fortress language, its features and the lessons learned from the project.

Damian Conway's hour-long keynote at the Perl conference, On the Shoulders of Giants, showing off Perl 6 (Raku) features with history, algorithms and a quantum math operator built with grammars. It is delivered with comic flair.