code as data

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.

Database pioneer Michael Stonebraker argues that 'big data' is really at least four different problems: big volumes with small analytics, big analytics, velocity, and variety. He comments on where each market is heading.

Mark Raasveldt of CWI presents DuckDB, an embeddable analytical database described as the SQLite for analytics, in a CMU Database Group talk. He explains why it was built, what it is for, and how it works.

Jon Gjengset's 2020 PhD dissertation presentation at MIT on partial state in dataflow-based materialized views, the idea behind the Noria database. The Q&A is cut out.

Simon Peyton Jones explains nested data parallelism and Data Parallel Haskell, an approach to exploiting multicore and distributed hardware while keeping a simple single-control-flow programming model.

Erlang co-creator Joe Armstrong's Code BEAM SF 2018 keynote revisits good ideas from the history of computing that were dropped, and asks which should be revived. It also touches on Erlang and Elixir.

Peter Norvig's UBC distinguished lecture on how massive amounts of simple data, such as for language modeling, can yield understanding that hand-built models could not.

David Beazley's PyCon India closing keynote, in which he live-codes a stack machine and grows it into an interpreter that runs WebAssembly, then uses it to play a Rust-written game. It requires no prior WebAssembly knowledge.

A five-minute lightning demo of VisiData, a terminal tool for exploring and manipulating data. It uses two months of NYC 311 complaint data to drill down, plot points on a virtual map and save selected rows.

SQLite creator Richard Hipp gives a history of SQLite and explains where it shines as a database at the edge of the network with no DBA. He covers long-term support, testing and how it is used in products.

Zig creator Andrew Kelley's RedisConf 2020 talk on modeling data flow with asynchronous I/O in Zig. It explains how Zig's async/await avoids function coloring, and Loris Cro demonstrates OkRedis, a zero-allocation Redis client.

Avi Bryant demos Dabble DB, a web-based spreadsheet-like database for building apps without code. It shows how users can model and relate data through a smooth interface.

Lukas Eder's Devoxx talk on how modern cost-based SQL optimizers rewrite and plan queries in ways developers would not expect. It argues that declarative SQL, used well, can run complex queries very fast.

Edward Kmett's 2013 talk at Prezi in Budapest on succinct data structures, which store data in close to the information-theoretic minimum space while supporting fast queries. It ties together the research and walks through his Haskell succinct library.

Eager Space examines the practicality of putting data centers in orbit, walking through three scenarios with cost calculations and the launch cost reductions that would be required.

Andreas Kling live-codes a prototype JavaScript JIT compiler for the LibJS engine used in SerenityOS and Ladybird. He builds a standalone bytecode VM, a simple interpreter, and then a simple JIT in about 80 minutes.

Douglas Crockford's code::dive 2022 talk on what the next programming language should look like. He presents ideas behind his Misty language, including message-passing actors.

Redis Labs and Tim Davis present RedisGraph, which uses GraphBLAS to treat graph queries in Cypher as sparse linear algebra for lower latency.

A short product demo of Dabble DB, a web tool for importing, entering and manipulating structured data with little effort. It was built in Smalltalk and later acquired by Twitter.

Martin Kleppmann's Kafka Summit 2018 keynote asks whether Kafka can be considered a database. He covers event logs and related data-systems ideas.

A short clip of a TiVo paid-programming broadcast from the early 2000s, which TiVo used to send guide data and service updates to DVRs over cable TV before broadband was common.

Bryan Cantrill's Uptime 2017 talk on the engineering challenges of the stateful data path, including storage, firmware and hardware bugs. It uses the 'zebras vs. horses' diagnostic heuristic to explain why rare failures keep appearing.

A London Haskell talk on the algebra of algebraic data types, showing how sum and product types behave like arithmetic. It frames types as numbers obeying algebraic laws.

Jason Scott's DerbyCon 2012 talk on rescuing the Prince of Persia source code from old floppy disks, working with the game's author Jordan Mechner. It is a story of digital archaeology and recovering data from ancient media.

Dan Abramov's talk on the wet codebase, using visualizations to show how removing all duplication too early produces wrong abstractions that are hard to unwind.

Peter Norvig's 2007 Google talk on theorizing from data, covering what huge datasets can do for language understanding, translation, information extraction and inference. It argues that more data often beats cleverer models.

John Ousterhout's Netdev 0x16 keynote arguing that nearly every aspect of TCP is wrong for the datacenter, from connections and streams to reliable delivery and congestion control. He presents the case for a replacement protocol.

Malte Skarupke's C++Now 2018 talk on hash table performance, explaining why std::unordered_map is slow and memory hungry and presenting faster designs, including his bytell hash map.

Michael Arntzenius's Strange Loop talk on Datafun, a functional query language that brings database-style querying into a general-purpose language. It discusses bridging database theory and programming languages.

A sketch from the Seattle comedy show Almost Live! in which Pat Cashman plays a US Bell rep explaining the new 425 area code. It first aired in 1997.

A talk by Yuri Iozzelli at a WebAssembly meetup on CheerpX, an x86 virtual machine running in the browser. It uses a JIT compiler that emits WebAssembly at runtime to run real native applications. It covers the architecture and demos such as porting a multiplayer C++ game.

Edward Kmett speaks at the Boston Haskell meetup about type classes and the design tradeoffs of global coherence compared with other approaches to implicit instances. It covers why uniqueness of instances matters for reasoning and refactoring.

The original 2012 screencast introducing Meteor, a JavaScript framework for building web apps quickly. It demonstrates realtime updates, latency compensation and low boilerplate.

Simon Peyton Jones's first lecture on types in Haskell from the Oregon Programming Languages Summer School 2013. It covers type classes and how they relate to OOP, subtyping and polymorphism.

Brandon Thomas demos Laser Pong, a game he built on a laser projector and projected onto buildings around Atlanta. It was a weekend project.

Ron Pressler's Curry On 2015 talk arguing that imperative languages should not be polluted with pure functional concepts like monads. He favors simple blocking code over non-blocking styles.

The first episode of a screencast series building djb's redo build system from scratch in Haskell. It explains the purpose of redo, writes initial code and sets up a GitHub repository.

Nathaniel J. Smith's PyCon 2018 talk introducing Trio, a Python concurrency library designed around usability and structured concurrency. He live-codes a problem and analyzes pitfalls in other async libraries.

Ned Batchelder's PyCon 2012 talk gives a quick overview of what Unicode is, then focuses on what a Python programmer needs to handle text correctly. It presents the 'Unicode sandwich' strategy: decode bytes at input, work with Unicode internally, encode at output.

A Clojure/conj 2014 talk by Lucas Cavalcanti and Edward Wible on four uses of Datomic. They cover HTTP caching, audit trails, mobile database sync and authorization, drawing on the immutable transaction log.