aws lambda

An AWS re:Invent 2018 session in which Holly Mesrobian and Marc Brooker explain how AWS Lambda is built, including its sandboxing, isolation and scaling architecture. It covers what happens under the hood when serverless code runs.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 session diving into the Nitro system, a set of hardware offload and security building blocks behind next-generation EC2 instances. It covers the design and architecture and how Nitro enables new instance types.

An AWS re:Invent 2019 session for advanced DynamoDB users on design patterns used by large customers, including Amazon retail. It covers GSI sharding, index overloading, graph processing, composite keys and transactional workflows.

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.

Eric Brandwine's AWS re:Invent 2015 session on how Amazon VPC networking works. It covers the problems the design solved, why traditional approaches do not scale, and the mechanisms used for customer isolation and VPC endpoints.

James Hamilton, AWS VP and distinguished engineer, gives an insider view of the innovations behind the AWS cloud at re:Invent 2014. He covers custom hardware, networking, regions and availability zones, and infrastructure at scale.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 talk on how AWS limits the blast radius of failures. It covers design techniques such as cell-based architecture and shuffle sharding.

An AWS re:Invent 2014 talk on the core distributed systems primitives behind AWS and Amazon.com, such as consensus, key-value stores and transactional logging. It describes how AWS builds large services from a few common building blocks.

Rick Houlihan's AWS re:Invent 2018 deep dive on advanced DynamoDB design patterns. It covers index overloading, GSI sharding, composite keys, graph processing and transactions.

Tom Stuart's Ruby Manor 3 talk builds FizzBuzz using nothing but Ruby lambdas, working through Church encodings of numbers, booleans and data structures. It is a hands-on introduction to lambda calculus.

Physicist Geoffrey West speaks at an FQXi conference on time about complexity and scaling laws. He covers how metabolism, growth and lifespan scale across organisms and how the same mathematics applies to cities and companies.

Philip Wadler's Lambda Days talk on propositions as types, the link between logic and computation that underlies theorem provers and programming language design.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 session on how DynamoDB was built as a hyper-scale NoSQL database. It discloses underpinnings of the service and how it is run for over 100,000 customers.

A Netflix performance engineer presents how Netflix tunes EC2 instances, covering instance type choice, Xen modes, SR-IOV and kernel tuning. The goal is near bare-metal performance in the cloud.

An AWS re:Invent session explaining Amazon's Working Backwards process, where teams start from customer needs and write a press release and FAQ (PR-FAQ) before building. It covers the five customer questions that frame the process.

Aditya Siram argues that functional programming has much to learn from Smalltalk's interactivity, using Pharo and Squeak to show live, visual, explorable programming environments.

Konrad Malawski's Strange Loop 2023 talk shows how the FoundationDB team adopted Swift incrementally in a C++ codebase. It covers Swift's C++ interoperability, which let them move single functions or entire types over one at a time.

A Lambda Days keynote by Simon Peyton Jones and Tim Sweeney introducing Verse, Epic's functional logic language for the metaverse. It covers existential variables, unification and expressions yielding multiple values.

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.

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.

Larry Lessig's TED talk argues that copyright law chokes creativity, drawing on John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights and the ASCAP cartel to make the case for reviving remix culture.

Jose Valim introduces Nx, the project bringing numerical computing to Elixir, covering multi-dimensional tensors, automatic differentiation and JIT compilation to CPU and GPU.

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.

James Hamilton of AWS gives a Velocity 2010 keynote on datacenter infrastructure innovation, focused on power and cooling costs and a breakdown of where datacenter spending goes.

Eugenia Cheng gives the opening keynote at Lambda World 2017, presenting category theory as very abstract algebra whose abstraction gives it broad applicability. She applies it to everyday questions including privilege and prejudice.

Jonathan Blow's LambdaConf 2025 keynote demonstrates the Jai programming language and explains its design. It includes demos of metaprogramming and tools that visualize programs.

Philip Wadler's Strange Loop talk on Propositions as Types, the link between logic and computation (the Curry-Howard correspondence). He traces its history through Church, Godel and Turing and shows how it shaped theorem provers and programming languages.

Jason Scott of textfiles.com tells the story at DEFCON 17 of being sued for two billion dollars by a scammer who plagued him and others for over a decade. The talk is tragic and funny, covering what he learned about misleading schemes.

Copenhagen's bicycle ambassador Mikael Colville-Andersen argues in a TEDx talk that bicycle helmets threaten bicycle culture. He says they distract from road design and make cycling look dangerous.

Scott Arciszewski's DEF CON 26 Crypto and Privacy Village talk critiquing the JOSE standards (JWT, JWS, JWE) and showing how to design cryptographic tokens more safely.

Mark Ferrari, the LucasArts background artist, explains in a GDC 2016 talk how he draws 8-bit graphics. He covers color cycling and palette shifting to create complex animated scenery without frame animation.

Martin Kleppmann argues that databases are global shared mutable state and proposes treating them as an ever-growing log of immutable facts. Derived data such as caches, indexes and views is then built by stream processors like Apache Samza. The talk draws on Kafka and LinkedIn's experience with commit logs.

Douglas Adams gives a talk at UCSB, recorded shortly before his death, about the odd lives of animals and what they suggest about humanity's future. It draws on his Last Chance to See work and is funny and wide-ranging.

A DEF CON 26 talk by investigative journalists and hackers on the fake science industry, with bogus conferences and predatory journals that give studies false credibility. It draws on a large investigation into the money behind them.

Veritasium's Derek Muller gives a Perimeter Institute livestream on how AI might change teaching and learning. He draws on past technology shifts and cognitive science to argue that learning requires effortful repetition.

Robert Martin's RailsConf 2009 talk looks at why Smalltalk lost out despite its technical strengths. He draws lessons about language communities and arrogance that he argues could hurt Ruby too.

Richard Feldman explains how pure functional languages can match or beat imperative ones on performance. Compilers can turn immutable code into in-place mutation, avoiding naive copying. The talk draws on his work on the Roc language.

Bryan Cantrill argues that programming languages and platforms reflect core values, and compares languages through that lens, with Rust as a main example. He draws on his experience with Solaris, DTrace and ZFS.

Cardiologist James O'Keefe argues in a TEDx talk that moderate running confers the best longevity benefits, while extreme endurance training can damage the heart. He draws on data and his own experience as a lifelong runner.

Nickolas Means tells the story of United Airlines Flight 232, which lost all flight control yet saved more than half its passengers. He draws lessons on teamwork, crew resource management and leadership for software teams.