code generation

Blizzard's Timothy Ford explains in this 2017 GDC session how Overwatch uses an Entity Component System architecture for layered gameplay. He also covers its server-authoritative netcode with client-side prediction and how they keep the game responsive and fair.

The first lesson of Uncle Bob (Robert C. Martin)'s "Coding Better World Together" series. It makes the case for clean code and for treating software craftsmanship as an ethical and professional responsibility. It runs about 109 minutes.

Ubisoft procedural technical artist Etienne Carrier explains the Houdini-based tools used to build Far Cry 5's roughly 100 square km open world. It covers generating biomes, texturing terrain, freshwater networks, cliff rocks and vegetation placement.

Day 21 of Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, which covers loading game code dynamically from a DLL on Windows. He builds hot reloading of C game code from scratch in about an hour and a half.

Cliff Click of Azul Systems gives a Google Tech Talk on running Java business applications on a machine with about a thousand cores. He covers hardware and software codesign, including garbage collection hardware and the JIT.

Steve Yegge's Stanford seminar on GROK, Google's internal large-scale, cross-language source code analysis system. It covers how the system helps with code search and understanding across Google's huge codebase.

At CppCon 2017 Herb Sutter presents his work on evolving C++ through compile-time code generation, including metaclasses and reflection. The aim is to make the language both more powerful and simpler by letting programmers express intent directly.

Robert 'Uncle Bob' Martin speaks at Yale School of Management about clean, well-written code and what makes good software development. The talk covers his views on OOP, architecture and professional practice.

A long Tsoding Daily programming stream in which he implements hot code reloading in C by loading a dynamic library at runtime without stopping the main program. It also touches on migrating struct versions across reloads.

Kara Swisher interviews Apple CEO Tim Cook, designer Jony Ive and Laurene Powell Jobs at the 2022 Code Conference. They discuss Apple's history, design, privacy and advertising, and the company's future leadership.

Greg Young's Code on the Beach 2014 talk on CQRS and event sourcing. He argues mature domains are built on facts that occurred rather than current state, and covers the business and technical benefits.

Jason Turner's CppCon 2016 talk builds a simple Commodore 64 game using C++17, showing how constexpr and const let a modern compiler produce tight 6502 code. He walks through assembly output to show abstractions being optimized away.

GDC 2019 session where Insomniac's David Santiago describes the procedural systems used to build Manhattan for Marvel's Spider-Man. It covers the open-world pipeline and how each system was designed to support iteration and dependencies.

Lesson 1 of fast.ai's Practical Deep Learning for Coders, taught by Jeremy Howard. It takes coders from running code in a Jupyter notebook straight into training a real image model.

Andrej Karpathy builds a GPT from scratch in code, following Attention Is All You Need and GPT-2/3, in about two hours using PyTorch. He connects it to ChatGPT and assumes familiarity with his earlier makemore videos.

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.

Dylan Beattie's NDC London talk on code written for art, fun and curiosity rather than utility. It includes quines, live music programming with Sonic Pi, and a memorable closing.

Casey Muratori's University of Twente guest lecture is a case study in how straightforward code can cut thousands of lines and tens of seconds of runtime down to a few dozen lines running in under a second. It uses concrete examples to show why software is often an order of magnitude slower than it should be.

Bob Beck of OpenBSD describes the first month of LibreSSL, the fork aimed at cleaning up OpenSSL, including oddities found in the code base and why it was cleaned rather than audited cryptographically.

Sean Parent's CppCon 2015 talk on better use of standard containers and the goal of having no incidental data structures. It argues that proper containers can greatly simplify code.

Scott Meyers explains how CPU caches work and why they matter for performance, covering cache levels, access speeds, associativity, and effects in multithreaded code. The focus is C++ and cache-aware, data-oriented programming.

John McCall of Apple's Swift team presents at CppNow 2023 on introducing a memory-safe successor language into large C++ code bases. He argues incremental improvement of C++ hits hard limits and explains Swift's C++ interoperability for gradual migration.

Bob Beck of OpenBSD gives a BSDCan 2014 talk on the first month of LibreSSL, the OpenSSL fork. He explains why they forked, what they removed, and examples of the problems found in the OpenSSL code base.

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.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Ocarina of Time at Summer Games Done Quick 2022, using TASBot and arbitrary code execution to reach an alternate ending in about 53 minutes. The run is introduced by its creators and followed by an interview.

Pat Wyatt, a veteran game programmer who worked at Blizzard and ArenaNet, speaks at HandmadeCon 2015 in a conversation with Casey Muratori. He discusses network code and architecture in games he worked on, including mistakes on Diablo and the success of Guild Wars.

Jon Gjengset spends about three hours livecoding complex changes in a Rust codebase with agentic AI tools, testing his hypothesis that AI is weak at non-pattern work. He documents where Claude Code helps and where it struggles.

Kevlin Henney revisits structured programming, from Go To Statement Considered Harmful to block-structured code and object orientation. He argues it still matters for how we write code today.

Jon Gjengset's roughly four-hour live stream implementing part of a BitTorrent client in Rust, following CodeCrafters' test-guided challenge. He builds from scratch and shows idiomatic error handling along the way.

Associate Professor Simon Michaux presents estimates of the metals needed to build one generation of renewable technology to replace fossil fuels. He argues current production and reserves fall far short, with copper a key shortfall.

Ron Garret tells the story of the Remote Agent Experiment on NASA's Deep Space 1, where autonomous software controlled a spacecraft in 1999. He describes debugging Lisp code remotely from millions of miles away.

Dan Bornstein's Google I/O 2008 talk on the internals of Dalvik, the virtual machine that runs Android code. It covers the motivation for its design, the dex format and its register-based interpreter, plus tips for writing code that suits the platform.

Brian Kernighan's 2009 talk at Princeton on the Elements of Programming Style, discussing readable code, avoiding cleverness and flawed examples in programming tutorials.

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.

Walter Bright explains to the Northwest C++ Users Group how the D programming language can interface directly with legacy C++ code. He covers why C++ is hard to interface with and how D approaches the problem.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) gives a talk on the SOLID principles of object-oriented and agile design, in the context of encapsulation and clean code.

A very long livestream in which Ron Gilbert and Frank Cifaldi look at the making of The Secret of Monkey Island, including its SCUMM source code, which they edit and recompile live.

Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg interview Elon Musk at Code Conference 2016 about one-way Mars missions, electric vehicles, autonomous cars, SpaceX booster reuse and AI.

Eskil Steenberg's two-hour talk on his personal approach to writing C, covering code style, structure, naming, pointers and large-project organization. He warns it contains a fair bit of programming religion.

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.