api design

Joshua Bloch's Google Tech Talk on how to design good APIs and why it matters, with concrete principles and examples. It treats every programmer as an occasional API designer.

Sebastian Markbage explains how React is moving toward a minimal API surface by leaning on language features and patterns instead of dedicated framework APIs. He also touches on JSX and syntax proposals for future JavaScript.

Erik Meijer argues that category theory is the mathematicians' version of interface-based design. He shows that Java 8 lambdas and method references form a Cartesian closed category.

John Ousterhout, Stanford professor and creator of Tcl, presents the ideas of his book A Philosophy of Software Design in a Talks at Google session. He covers managing complexity, deep modules and interfaces, and what he teaches in his Stanford software design course.

Stuart Halloway's satirical talk describes how to protect yourself from industry change by spreading complexity through systems while following idiomatic practice. It uses this inversion to catalog software design anti-patterns.

Mark Bastian contrasts top-down object-oriented design with bottom-up, data-oriented design in Clojure. He models a board game as plain data plus small composable functions and compares it with a roughly 22-class OOP version.

Alex Martelli's Google Developers Day talk on classic design patterns (creational, structural and behavioral) and how they appear in Python. He stresses that patterns must be studied in the context of the implementing language.

Paul Phillips, a Typesafe co-founder and prolific Scala committer, explains why he walked away from Scala. He critiques the Scala collections library and presents his own design focused on immutability, performance and correctness.

Mike Acton of Insomniac Games argues that a program's purpose is transforming data, and shows how common C++ approaches work against that in performance-critical game development. He covers cache behavior, data layout and the limits of compilers.

Runar Bjarnason's Scala World talk argues that restraint and precision in components beat power and flexibility. Constraints on parts make them easier to compose into systems.

Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, presents practical data-oriented design techniques for shrinking memory footprint and making programs cache friendly. He ends with a case study of how these ideas sped up the Zig compiler.

A CppCon 2018 talk arguing that OOP has failed to deliver on reuse and performance, and presenting data-oriented design for C++ with practical worked examples from real systems.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) talks about clean architecture and design, including keeping the database and frameworks out of the center of an application. It is an hour-long conference talk.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) gives a talk on the SOLID principles of object-oriented and agile design, in the context of encapsulation and clean code.

A design essay on why products designed in Western contexts often fail when deployed in developing countries. It covers expert blindness and cultural assumptions, with examples such as malaria nets and the One Laptop Per Child project.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, talks at Curry On 2015 about user-focused language design. He explains the principles behind Elm and how to make a functional, typed language as approachable as JavaScript.

Tantacrul gives a detailed UX and UI design review of the MuseScore 3 notation software and compares it with Sibelius. It examines visual appeal, navigation and notation quality.

The 1969 pitch film in which Saul Bass presents the Bell System logo redesign to AT&T, part of the largest corporate re-identity program in U.S. history.

Tantacrul walks through how the MuseScore 4 team was built and how design decisions were made for the overhaul of a huge legacy notation app. It covers playback and engraving quality improvements.

TEDxStanford talk by Bill Burnett, executive director of Stanford's design program, on applying design thinking to your own life and career. He offers five practical tips such as getting curious, talking to people and trying things.

Jonathan Blow talks at Gamelab 2018 about the design decisions behind Jai, the programming language he is building for game programmers. He covers low-friction development, quality of life and the effects of compile times.

A 100-minute tutorial from Phil's Lab on designing an STM32-based 'black pill' PCB in KiCad 6. It covers schematic capture, two-layer layout and routing, USB, and sending the board for manufacture and assembly.

Roman Mars gives a funny TED talk on vexillology, laying out five basic principles of good flag design and why many city flags fail them.

Brian Kernighan gives a talk at the University of Nottingham on how to succeed in language design without really trying. He draws on his experience with awk and other languages.

A 2001 panel with Paul Graham, John Maeda, Jonathan Rees and Guy Steele on programming language design, part of the Dynamic Languages Wizards Series.

A demonstration comparing what a month of vaping versus a month of smoking cigarettes does to the lungs, using a filter to show the residue. It is part of a series of similar experiments.

The final part of Dan Gelbart's 18-part Building Prototypes series, focused on mechanical design. It opens with a demonstration of stiffness and covers practical design principles for prototype machines.

An hour-plus Some More News episode that critiques Ben Shapiro's arguments and record of errors. It is a long, comedic and opinionated breakdown.

Technology Connections praises a 1940s-50s Sunbeam toaster and explains what makes a toaster well designed, drawing on a vintage Sunbeam video.

CGP Grey discusses flag design principles and grades flags, following the Minnesota state flag redesign. It argues for simple, distinctive flags.

Christian Schafmeister presents CANDO at the 2016 European Lisp Symposium. It is a compiled Lisp-based language for designing macromolecules and nanoscale materials, built on the Clasp implementation of Common Lisp.

The Futur's guide to pricing design and creative work, arguing against hourly rates and for value-based pricing. It features Blair Enns and says to price the client, not the job.

Wildlife videographer Dani Connor Wild talks with Oscar-winning sound designer Mark Mangini about how her red squirrel recording became the desert mouse sound in Dune.

Neil Cicierega's parody song 'Redesign Your Logo', played over a live backing video with corporate PowerPoint visuals. It mocks the infamous Pepsi design strategy presentation.

A Telegraph news clip showing newly revealed footage from the January 6 Capitol attack, with rioters overwhelming police. It accompanies coverage of the congressional committee's televised hearing.

Google's 2014 reel introducing Material Design, a visual language based on a paper-and-ink material metaphor and a system of motion. It is a short promotional video.

Rich Hickey's 2013 talk applies language-design thinking to whole systems, covering names, queues, data, failure, and the interfaces between programs. It ends with a call to action for building systems holistically.

James Mickens's 2015 Harvard colloquium argues that browsers are bloated and insecure because feature races trump clean interface design. He presents a cleaner, more secure browser architecture (Atlantis) with a much smaller API surface.

Luca Sas's ACCU 2021 talk on Modern C, a style of C and C-like C++ aligned with data-oriented design. It covers centralized memory management, zero-is-initialization, error handling and API design.

Michael Bryzek of Flow gives a QCon London 2018 talk on key decisions for building maintainable microservices. It covers infrastructure, continuous deployment, communication, event streaming and language choice.