city flags

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.

Stuart Halloway argues that simplicity is objective, with a definition and etymology useful to programmers, rather than a subjective buzzword. He shows how this view informs Clojure's design and how to make programs simpler.

Developmental and synthetic biologist Michael Levin speaks at a Harvard Extension student event on bioelectricity, body intelligence and regenerative medicine. He discusses how cell electrical networks guide growth and form.

Steve Jobs presents Apple's proposal for a new campus to the Cupertino City Council in June 2011, answering council members' questions about the plan.

Rich Hickey's keynote at RailsConf 2012, a close sibling of his 'Simple Made Easy' talk. He distinguishes simple (not intertwined) from easy (familiar), and argues that software complexity comes from complecting things, with Rails-specific examples including large gem collections.

Alan Kay's 2015 talk on the power of simplicity, arguing that systems become simpler by building on more sophisticated fundamental building blocks and that big research horizons drove invention at Xerox PARC. It ranges across computing, tools and scaling software.

Rob Pike's dotGo 2015 talk argues that Go only seems simple, and that its simplicity hides real complexity that is part of the design. He explains the thinking behind Go's restraint in features.

Making-of video about ROM City Rampage, the NES version of Retro City Rampage, covering how the game's core was crunched to run on real 8-bit hardware and how NES games are made.

Jon Moore's Strange Loop 2017 talk argues that rate limiting is the wrong tool for protecting services from noisy clients. He proposes concurrency-based capacity management and quotas instead.

John Allspaw and Paul Hammond's Velocity 09 talk on how Flickr achieved ten or more deploys per day through close cooperation between development and operations.

A four-minute Velocity 2011 talk in which Artur Bergman, then at Wikia, argues bluntly and with profanity that SSDs should replace spinning disks in servers.

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.

Michael Levin's NeurIPS 2018 talk on bioelectric computation outside the nervous system, showing how cell electrical networks shape development and regeneration. It covers morphological information processing in living tissue.

Biologist Michael Levin explains the bioelectric layer that coordinates cells to build organs and bodies, showing footage of two-headed worms and introducing xenobots. He discusses implications for medicine and the nature of life.

Michael Levin's keynote at the ALife 2020 conference, 'Robot Cancer', on how bioelectric signaling in embryogenesis and regeneration informs unconventional computing, cognition and the 'software of life'. He argues biology offers lessons for building adaptive machines.

Richard Cook's short Velocity 2013 talk on resilience in complex adaptive systems, arguing systems operate near the edge of failure and that the surprise is how rarely they fail. He presents a model of how pressures push systems toward failure boundaries.

A five-minute excerpt of Rich Hickey's Clojure Made Simple talk, with new slides, ranting about HttpServletRequest and specificity. He argues for using generic maps instead of many specific classes and getters.

Bryan Hunter's GigCityElixir 2023 talk on HCA Healthcare's Waterpark system, built on Elixir/Erlang. It describes how the architecture is distributed and fault-tolerant, with a multi-datacenter cluster and runtime code swapping.

Dr. Richard Cook, a physician and patient safety researcher, presents his ideas on how complex systems fail, at Velocity 2012. He argues for designing for resiliency rather than trying to exhaustively handle every failure mode.

MIT's Donald Sadoway presents the liquid metal battery as a design for grid-scale stationary electricity storage, at an Imperial College London event in 2018. He covers the grid benefits of massive-scale storage.

Mikey Dickerson's keynote at Velocity NY 2014, one year after the healthcare.gov launch failure. He recounts how a small team rescued the site and what the episode showed about government IT contracting.

Andrew Ng speaks at the Stanford MSx Future Forum about how AI is transforming industry after industry, comparing its impact to electricity. The talk also touches on evil-AI worries, jobs and basic income.

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.

Jonathan Blow speaks at UC Berkeley's CSUA about how to program independent games. He argues for keeping code simple, avoiding unnecessary work, and shipping.

Rich Hickey's Strange Loop 2011 keynote separates 'simple' (not intertwined) from 'easy' (familiar or near at hand) and argues that software complexity comes from complecting things. It offers a vocabulary for judging designs and abstractions.

Jack Diederich's PyCon 2012 talk argues that classes are overused in Python and walks through real code, refactoring away unnecessary classes, exceptions and modules. It popularized the heuristic that a class with two methods, one being __init__, should be a function.

Moxie Marlinspike's BlackHat 2011 talk examines weaknesses of SSL and the certificate authority system and proposes Convergence, a decentralized notary approach with trust agility.

Dr. Terry Wahls tells how she used diet to manage her multiple sclerosis and get out of a wheelchair, drawing on mitochondrial biology. TED flagged the talk as health advice based on personal narrative.

Moxie Marlinspike's DEF CON 19 talk on the weaknesses of SSL and the certificate authority system. He explains how CA trust became a problem and proposes an alternative that removes the CA oligopoly without reducing security.

Rob Pike presents Go Proverbs at Gopherfest 2015, a set of pithy aphorisms about Go design such as 'Clear is better than clever' and 'A little copying is better than a little dependency'.

A short excerpt of Rob Pike's Lang.NEXT 2014 talk where he describes Go's target audience as young Google programmers who are not researchers. The language has to be easy for them to understand and adopt.

Rich Hickey's Strange Loop 2011 keynote distinguishing 'simple' (not intertwined) from 'easy' (familiar or near at hand). It argues that software complexity comes from complecting things and that we should pick simple constructs.

Tim Ewald's Clojure/conj talk uses furniture making with hand tools versus machine tools as an allegory for software. It explores how automation changes what we make and how we think about our work, and why Clojure's small set of simple tools matters.

Dan Geer's Black Hat 2014 keynote argues that cybersecurity is a matter of power and policy rather than wishful thinking. He covers surveillance, the vulnerability market, software liability and privacy as the capacity to misrepresent yourself.

Liz Rice builds a container from scratch in about 100 lines of Go, showing that a container is not a lightweight VM but a set of Linux kernel features and flags.

Frans de Waal's TED talk shows videos of behavioral experiments on primates and other mammals that reveal empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity. He argues these moral traits are not uniquely human.

Bryan Cantrill's Velocity NYC 2015 talk argues for running containers directly on bare metal rather than layering them on virtual machines. He covers the history of containers and how SmartOS runs Linux workloads via syscall emulation.

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.

Misko Hevery's Clean Code Talk shows how to use object-oriented techniques such as polymorphism to remove repeated if and switch statements. The result is code that is easier to test, understand and maintain.

Douglas Crockford tells how JSON was discovered rather than invented, and how its simplicity made it a dominant data interchange format. He also covers surrounding history such as earlier Netscape usage and the 'Good, not Evil' license story.