code visualization

Casey Muratori shows how typical 'clean code' object-oriented patterns can cost large factors in performance. He benchmarks them against simpler data-oriented code.

CGP Grey explains that postal codes are routing instructions for mail rather than geographic regions. He looks at the quirks and problems this causes.

3Blue1Brown's discovery-oriented introduction to error correction codes, building up Hamming codes from the puzzle of locating a flipped bit. It explains the parity-check idea and why it is so efficient.

MattKC fits a playable Snake game into a QR code by writing tiny x86 machine code and patching the ZBar scanner so it can run the decoded data.

Veritasium builds a QR code by hand to explain how it works. It covers the history of Morse code and barcodes, how QR codes encode data, why damaged codes still scan, and how safe they are.

A short video that reads out comments from the leaked Team Fortress 2 source code to show the frustration of Valve's programmers over time.

A DEF CON 29 talk by Richard Henderson about encoding the EICAR antivirus test string into QR codes and barcodes and scanning them at real systems. Many systems that do not expect such input misbehave or collapse, including a parking garage system.

8-Bit Show And Tell walks through the BASIC source code of the original Commodore 64 Sid Meier's Pirates!. It covers bugs, quirks and traces of abandoned features and scenarios left in the code.

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.

Matthias Wandel tests old and new code on a range of PCs, including a new mini PC, to measure how much faster modern hardware really is. He also shows optimization techniques such as branchless code, with benchmark programs on GitHub.

Casey Muratori's invited lecture on where bad code comes from, rebroadcast from a Twitch stream. He critiques conventional wisdom such as SOLID and Clean Code and argues about how those habits lead to slow, poorly structured software.

CodeParade's short devlog on how spherical geometry looks in 2D and 3D and why it feels so unusual, part of the Hyperbolica series on a non-Euclidean game.

Pokey Rule presents Cursorless, a spoken language designed for editing code by voice, built on tree-sitter parsing with smart structural and simple token-level primitives. The talk is from Strange Loop 2023.

CGP Grey explains why airport codes are inconsistent and sometimes confusing, from their origins in old weather station codes to the quirks that cause mistakes. He builds the story around a single typo that sent a flight to the wrong continent.

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.

Matt Parker follows the community effort to speed up his slow Wordle-solving code, which ended up running hundreds of millions of times faster. He walks through the techniques contributors used.

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.

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.

Kaze Emanuar explains how he rewrote and optimized the Super Mario 64 source code so it runs far faster on real N64 hardware. He covers performance bottlenecks and fixes in detail for his ROM hacks.

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.

ScienceClic explains why the rubber sheet analogy for general relativity is misleading and offers a new visualization that includes the curvature of time and shows gravity as motion through curved spacetime.

Dylan Beattie's conference talk explores the history and mess behind plain text: encodings, Unicode, line endings and the many ways text goes wrong. It argues that the tidy idea of plain text hides a lot of complexity underneath everyday software.

The first of an eight-part ScienceClic series building general relativity, covering worldlines, proper time and coordinate systems with animated visualizations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Andrej Karpathy builds the GPT tokenizer from scratch, implementing byte pair encoding along with encode and decode. He shows how many odd LLM behaviors trace back to tokenization, and covers Unicode byte encodings along the way.

Emery Berger argues that performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern systems, showing how code layout and link order can swamp optimization effects. He presents tools that evaluate performance more reliably.

Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.

2swap explains how he solved the Klotski sliding-block puzzle by mapping its full state space as a graph and visualizing it. The video includes footage of the Guinness world-record solve and links to an interactive graph.

ScienceClic gives a 15-minute animated introduction to quantum field theory, covering fields, spin, conserved quantities, the standard model and interactions.

Jon Gjengset's Rust NYC talk explaining what `unsafe` in Rust actually means, why it is dangerous, and why it is sometimes necessary. He works through the Rustonomicon to separate fair concerns from overblown ones.

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.

Physicist Angela Collier rants for 42 minutes about why violin plots are a poor way to show data, citing papers on violin and bean plots. It is part lecture on how to read distributions and part opinionated critique.

About Here explains how North American building codes requiring two staircases make small multi-story apartment buildings hard to build, and contrasts this with places that allow single-stair designs.

Ben Eater explains how the PS/2 keyboard interface works, covering its clocked serial protocol and scancodes. He builds up the hardware-level understanding needed to read keypresses.

A compilation of the hacking scenes from the 1995 film Hackers, featuring flashy visualizations of computer intrusion.