background checks

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.

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.

Rich Hickey's philosophical talk from the first Clojure Conj in 2010. He argues that good design comes from deliberate, away-from-keyboard thinking, and describes how to feed the background mind so it solves problems.

In this TED talk, Lawrence Lessig argues that American politics is corrupted by Congress's dependence on funding from a tiny fraction of citizens. He uses rapid-fire visuals and calls for a bipartisan push to reclaim the Republic.

Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, the creators of ZFS, present 'ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems' at the 2008 SNIA Software Developers' Conference. They explain the design, including copy-on-write, checksumming and avoiding the write hole.

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.

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.

Rich Hickey introduces Clojure to the NYC Java Study Group in the first of a two-part talk. It covers reader syntax, core data structures, code-as-data, evaluation, special operators, functions, macros and sequences, assuming no Lisp background.

Michael Feathers' GOTO Chicago 2018 talk on reducing error checks and conditional logic in code. He offers a framework for handling errors and decisions at the level of code and architecture.

Tom Caputi presents the design of native encryption for ZFS at the OpenZFS Developer Summit, including design decisions and how authentication uses checksum fields.

Ori Bernstein gives an overview of Plan 9 at a NYC*BUG meeting. He explains what the system is, how it is built, what has happened since Bell Labs, and what its design teaches, with a live demo.

Aaron Hsu explains why programmers often find APL harder to learn than people with no programming background. He identifies eight patterns that contrast traditional software engineering practice with APL practice, starting from Ken Iverson's language design principles.

Tim Ansell presents the SkyWater PDK, a fully open source manufacturable process development kit for a 130nm process, as the first FOSSi Dial-Up talk. He covers its role in a fully open chip design flow.

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

Alan Watson Featherstone, founder of Trees for Life, describes nearly 30 years of work restoring the ancient Caledonian Forest in the Scottish Highlands, illustrated with his photography.

Randall Munroe, creator of xkcd, gives an Authors@Google talk in 2007 about the webcomic and his background, followed by audience Q&A. Donald Knuth and Guido van Rossum ask questions during the session.

Policy advisor Simon Anholt presents the Good Country Index, a measure of how much each nation contributes to the world beyond its own borders. In a funny TED talk he argues governments should think globally, and reveals which countries rank surprisingly.

Noam Chomsky speaks at Google Cambridge in 2017 about his political development and the control of information and media. It is a wide-ranging talk with audience discussion.

A DConf 2019 talk by Robert Schadek arguing that spreadsheets are the world's dominant programming language and that D can be used to replace them. It looks at spreadsheet quirks and then at techniques for moving away from them.

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.

ElixirConf EU 2023 talk by Giuseppe Castagna and Guillaume Duboc on bringing set-theoretic types to Elixir, and the benefits such a type system could offer such as catching bugs.

Tony Hoare's InfoQ talk in which he describes introducing null references in ALGOL W in 1965 and calls it his billion-dollar mistake. He discusses language designer responsibility and run-time checks.