constraints

Runar Bjarnason's Scala World talk argues that restraint and precision in components beat power and flexibility. Constraints on parts make them easier to compose into systems.

Joseph White, creator of PICO-8, retraces the design of the fantasy console and how tools can shape and guide creative work. He discusses cozy, constrained design spaces and the influence of user-made cartridges.

David Crane, designer of Pitfall for the Atari 2600, gives a GDC 2011 postmortem on the game's design challenges. He covers how he fit a large world into the console's tiny memory. The session ends with Q&A.

Without Boats, a Rust language team member, explains the design of Rust's async/await at RustLatam 2019. He covers the history and constraints behind zero-cost, allocation-free async state machines.

Donald Knuth explains at Stanford's CCRMA the constraint-based methods he is using to compose a major work for pipe organ.

Jason Cohen's MicroConf talk on designing a bootstrapped business by starting from your own strengths, goals and constraints. He works backward to the business model, pricing, market and product that fit, with practical points like annual prepay and pricing tiers.

Jonathan Blow's CreativeMornings talk arguing that business models shape game design, drawing an analogy between 1970s TV and HBO and between free-to-play and premium games. He calls for games that inspire awe rather than chase constraints.

Chandler Carruth argues in a CppCon 2019 talk that C++ has no truly zero-cost abstractions. Using examples like unique_ptr, ABI constraints and compile-time costs, he shows that abstractions cost runtime, compile time or human effort.

Gerald Sussman's 2011 Strange Loop keynote argues we still do not know how to compute, comparing biological systems with how we program machines. It touches on propagators, constraint programming and robustness.

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.

Timur Doumler's CppCon 2015 talk on how C++ is used in the audio industry. It covers the patterns and tools audio developers rely on, including handling real-time constraints.

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37signals, argues that planning is guessing and startups should focus on today. He says constraints are an advantage and that startups can bootstrap profitably in sizable markets.

Ilya Grigorik of Google's Make the Web Fast team explains how to build a mobile site that appears on screen within one second. He covers the network and rendering constraints on mobile.