blind developers

Saqib Shaikh, a blind developer at Microsoft, shows at Build 2017 how he writes and debugs code in Visual Studio using a screen reader. This version adds subtitles.

A five-minute CG sci-fi short film by Danil Krivoruchko, based on Peter Watts's novel Blindsight. It follows a revived crew member recalling a first contact mission, and took four years to make with artists worldwide.

A short extended clip of Steve Ballmer sweating and chanting "developers" on stage at a .NET presentation around 1999 or 2000.

People Make Games investigates how Roblox relies on young, often child, developers to build its content while paying them very little. It covers Roblox's monetization model, the revenue split, and the harms to kids who make games on the platform.

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.

Kristy Viers demonstrates the iPhone Magnifier combined with VoiceOver to describe the user's surroundings. She shows how the built-in feature reports scenes, faces and lighting.

Tom Scott explains why Ipley Cross in England's New Forest was one of Britain's most dangerous junctions. The angled crossroads lets a car's A-pillar hide approaching traffic and cyclists because there is no relative motion in the driver's view.

Stuff Made Here builds a device that lets a blind person perceive their surroundings by touch, using an iPad's lidar and a mechanical tactile display driven by motors. The video walks through the build and the limits he hit.

Kent Overstreet's Linux Foundation talk about writing a filesystem in Rust. Its Q&A segment, where Rust-for-Linux developers ask about interface semantics, became widely cited.

Jake Archibald argues that URLs are nearly impossible for humans to interpret, especially for security. He walks through what browsers do about it, including highlighting the registrable domain, and floats a possible better design.

A People Make Games follow-up investigation into Roblox, built on stories from players and creators after the channel's first video. It covers the platform's treatment of young developers and its moderation.

Gabriella Gonzalez argues that developers misunderstand marketing as deception or hype, and applies the technology-adoption ideas of Crossing the Chasm to Haskell. She looks at what keeps Haskell from reaching mainstream programmers and what a community can do about it.

DHH's opening keynote at Rails World 2024 in Toronto, where Rails 8 beta shipped. It covers built-in authentication, Propshaft, Solid Cache, Solid Queue, Solid Cable, Kamal 2 and Thruster, pitching the One Person Framework that needs no PaaS.

Bruce Waggoner of the Voyager team describes how engineers diagnosed Voyager 1's 2023 loss of telemetry and patched its flight software from 15 billion miles away. The talk covers the spacecraft's architecture and the scarcity of old documentation.

Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia analyzes Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, the first AAA game built around ray tracing. It covers the new global illumination, emissive lighting, DLSS and performance on AMD and Nvidia hardware.

A 2023 LLVM Developers' Meeting keynote by Abdul Dakkak, Chris Lattner and Jeff Niu introducing Mojo, a Python-family systems language built on MLIR and LLVM for heterogeneous computing.

TJ DeVries coins the term PDE (Personalized Development Environment) to describe editors like Neovim that you shape to your own workflow. He contrasts this with out-of-the-box IDEs and discusses why customizable tools appeal to developers.

minimme traces the timeline of 3D graphics engines on the Game Boy Advance, from early experiments to commercial 3D games, covering techniques such as voxel rendering. It is a history and showcase of what developers coaxed out of the limited hardware.

Steve Mould shows Spintronics, a set of mechanical components such as resistors, capacitors and transistors linked by chains, that give an intuitive feel for how electrical circuits work.

Tantacrul tells the story of Audacity, the widely used free audio editor, and announces his involvement in the project. It includes an interview with the original developers and a look at the software's usability.

A React Conf talk by Xuan Huang previewing React Forget, a compiler that automatically memoizes components. It argues for making memoization the default so developers need not write useMemo or useCallback by hand.

A clip of John Carmack on the Lex Fridman podcast discussing his programming setup, why he favors debuggers and IDEs, and his puzzlement at developers who avoid them.

A short video built around Douglas Crockford, creator of JSON, saying JavaScript is a flawed language and that developers should eventually move on from it. It is a brief commentary clip with little technical detail.

Yegor Denisov-Blanch of Stanford presents a study of nearly 100,000 developers at hundreds of companies, measuring how AI affects productivity from commit data. It finds an average boost of about 20% with wide variance by codebase, task complexity and stack.