cal henderson

Cal Henderson's DjangoCon 2008 keynote, "Why I Hate Django", is a funny critique of Django from a Flickr architect. It touches on scaling topics such as database replication.

John A. De Goes's Scalapeno keynote argues that Scala's popularity is declining because of compile times, complexity and compatibility problems. He proposes a path for Scala to survive, including a simplified functional subset.

Martin Kleppmann's Local-First Conf talk reviewing where the local-first idea came from, where it stands five years after the essay, and what the community should work toward. He argues for generic sync infrastructure.

A short film in which friends build the first true-to-scale model of the solar system, with full planetary orbits, on a Nevada dry lakebed. It conveys the real distances and sizes involved.

Gabriel Lebec's Fullstack Academy talk introduces lambda calculus syntax, the history of mathematical logic, and the essence of functional programming using JavaScript. It also covers combinators, currying and Church encodings.

Utah State plant scientist Bruce Bugbee presents his analysis of the energy and environmental costs of vertical and indoor farming. He argues artificial lighting cannot compete with sunlight in fields or greenhouses.

Dropbox engineer Kevin Modzelewski gives a Stanford colloquium on Dropbox's history and the technical problems it faced scaling, including detailed database schema decisions.

Deviant Ollam, head of a physical penetration testing team, presents tactics for getting into buildings, from bypassing door levers with a wire to defeating bank doors. He argues that physical security is often surprisingly weak.

David Beazley's PyCon 2019 tutorial derives the lambda calculus from the ground up in Python, using only single-argument functions. He builds booleans, numerals and more with no other language features.

The preface to Herb Gross's MIT OpenCourseWare 'Calculus Revisited: Single Variable Calculus', an older black-and-white lecture series. It introduces his approach to teaching calculus from the basics.

Linguist Geoff Lindsey explores vocal fry: what it is, who uses it, how it relates to glottal stops and accents, and why some people dislike it.

A two-hour NANOG tutorial by Richard Steenbergen aimed at network engineers, covering optical networking technologies. This is the updated 2017 edition of a recurring talk.

Bobby McFerrin uses audience participation at a World Science Festival event to demonstrate how instinctively people follow the pentatonic scale.

Lucas Pope, creator of Return of the Obra Dinn, explains in Ars Technica's War Stories how localizing the game's logbook nearly sank the project.

Adam Savage shows off his collection of analog calculators, ending with a 3D-printed, scaled reproduction of the Curta mechanical calculator built by Marcus Wu. The video examines the replica and the engineering behind it.

Technology Connections takes apart the step-by-step electromechanical logic of a 1970s pinball machine. He shows how relays, steppers and switches track state and score without electronics.

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

Paul Phillips, a former Scala core contributor, argues after moving a million lines of code that much of what the software industry does is wrong. He critiques Scala and compiler design and calls for better approaches.

Adam Tornhill's GOTO Copenhagen 2019 talk on how to prioritize technical debt in large codebases. It argues for combining code complexity with change frequency (hotspots) from version control data, rather than trying to quantify debt in the abstract.

Casey Neistat's short New York Times op-doc investigating how accurate restaurant and packaged-food calorie labels really are. He gets items from chains like Chipotle, Starbucks and Subway measured by nutrition researchers and compares them to the printed numbers.

A stand-up routine by Stewart Lee on political correctness, offering a satirical defense of inclusive language.

A PBS NewsHour report on a viral compilation of local TV anchors reading identical scripts, which raised concerns about Sinclair Broadcasting mixing partisan opinion into local news. It also covers Sinclair's reach and its bid to grow larger.

A VICE on HBO segment in which Thomas Morton joins a tour of born-again Christians in the Holy Land. It examines the end-times beliefs behind evangelical support for Israel.

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.

The first episode of Caltech's The Mechanical Universe, a 52-part introductory university physics series. David Goodstein introduces ideas from Copernicus to Newton, linking the physics of the heavens and the earth with computer animation.

Practical Engineering explains Mechanically Stabilized Earth, where layers of reinforcement make soil strong enough to hold heavy loads, shown with a sand structure supporting a car. It notes that MSE walls are everywhere in infrastructure.

Rick Reed of WhatsApp explains at Erlang Factory 2014 how the service scaled to billions of messages with a very small engineering team. He covers the FreeBSD and Erlang stack, Mnesia usage, server counts and bottleneck work.

The first video of 3Blue1Brown's Essence of Calculus series, which builds toward integrals, derivatives, and the fundamental theorem of calculus from a simple geometry question. It aims to make viewers feel they could have invented calculus themselves.

A clip from the 2011 film Margin Call in which senior partners hold an emergency meeting and decide to sell off toxic assets immediately. It is set at the start of the 2008 financial crisis.

A video essay from the Alt-Right Playbook series that explains how extremist movements draw ordinary people in, using deniable rhetoric, bad-faith games, and gradual escalation. It draws on books about the alt-right, male radicalization, and cult-style brainwashing.

Technology Connections explains weaknesses in the US electrical system, centering on how cord and circuit ratings can mismatch and cause fires. It covers extension cords, power strips and plug history in about 25 minutes.

Veritasium investigates PFAS forever chemicals, from Teflon's history to pollution of the global water system and their presence in the US population. It covers the corporate cover-up and the host's own blood tests.

A nine-minute Stewart Lee stand-up routine about political correctness and the claim that it has gone mad. It is dry, layered British comedy that takes the complaint apart.

The first lecture of Leonard Susskind's Stanford Continuing Studies course on modern physics, beginning with classical mechanics. It is the start of a six-quarter sequence on the theoretical foundations of physics.

Cuong Do of YouTube describes how a handful of engineers scaled the site, covering hardware, software and database scalability challenges during its rapid growth. The talk was given at the 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability.

Stanford Blitzscaling class session where Reid Hoffman interviews Eric Schmidt about structuring teams and scaling Google. Topics include Alphabet, hiring, and how Chrome and Android operated inside the company.

A clip from the documentary Ride with Larry showing a retired police captain with Parkinson's trying medical marijuana for the first time. The change in tremor, dyskinesia and voice is shown unedited.

A two-minute clip from the film Fight Club in which the narrator, a former recall coordinator, explains the formula companies use to decide whether a recall costs more than paying out settlements.

A Margin Call clip in which Will Emerson tries to persuade Eric Dale to return to the firm, and Dale recounts calculating the lifetimes saved by a bridge he helped build.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff lectures on how political debates are framed through language and metaphors tied to values, and on the moral worldviews behind progressive and conservative politics. It was given in 2005 at UC San Diego.