design

Joshua Bloch's Google Tech Talk on how to design good APIs and why it matters, with concrete principles and examples. It treats every programmer as an occasional API designer.

Alex Martelli's Google Developers Day talk on classic design patterns (creational, structural and behavioral) and how they appear in Python. He stresses that patterns must be studied in the context of the implementing language.

A 2006 parody made by a Microsoft team that shows how the company would redesign iPod packaging, with a box piled with feature claims, logos and clutter in contrast to Apple's clean design.

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.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk introducing Polyworld, an artificial life simulator used to evolve artificial intelligence by designing worlds rather than minds. It presents results from ongoing attempts to evolve intelligent behavior.

A 1993 interview in which Steve Jobs talks about designer Paul Rand, who created the NeXT logo. He recounts Rand's insistence on presenting a single design and his uncompromising professionalism.

Jensen Harris of the Office 2007 design team tells the behind-the-scenes story of the Ribbon at MIX08. He covers early prototypes, mistakes, and the UX principles used to design and validate it.

A Google Tech Talk arguing that the best interface requires the fewest clicks and choices, with Google search, Facebook, the iPod and Firefox as examples. It shows how minimizing interaction makes interfaces easier to learn.

James Howard Kunstler's TED talk argues that American public spaces and architecture have become unworthy of care, damaging civic life. He presents suburban sprawl and car-first design as failures of the common good.

Ian Piumarta's 2007 Stanford EE380 lecture on building a dynamic programming environment from the ground up, from the Viewpoints Research Institute's work. It covers the design of a language and system with a recursive design, parsing through code generation, and the COLA architecture.

A concept video from Nokia Research Center and Cambridge Nanoscience Center showing Morph, a flexible, self-cleaning, shape-changing phone imagined through nanotechnology.

A short concept video of Microsoft's unreleased Courier, a dual-screen tablet designed as a digital notebook with clippings and annotation. It was first leaked by Gizmodo in 2009.

Rob Pike's October 2009 Google Tech Talk introducing Go, a new experimental systems language designed for fast builds, concurrency and garbage collection. It covers the goals, syntax and type system.

Douglas Crockford's 2009 Google tech talk on the good and bad parts of JavaScript, based on his book. He argues for using a reliable subset of the language and avoiding its flawed features.

Ward Cunningham explains the history and intent of the debt metaphor, which he coined while refactoring the WyCash product. He says debt means code reflecting an incomplete understanding of the problem, not sloppy programming.

Peter Seibel's 2006 Google TechTalk on Practical Common Lisp, framed by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Paul Graham's Blub paradox. It shows Lisp features such as condition restarts and its generic-function object system.

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.

Larry Wall speaks at Google's Chicago office in 2008 about the Perl community, the language, and Perl 6. The talk touches on grammars, macros and error messages.

A short compilation of the gesture and multitouch interface scenes from the film Minority Report.

A one-minute clip filmed from the Arc de Triomphe showing chaotic multi-lane traffic in the surrounding roundabout, including a bus trying to cross about six lanes.

David MacKay's 2007 Google Tech Talk presents Dasher, a text-entry system driven by continuous gestures and a language model, reaching about 35 words per minute with one finger and 25 hands-free. It explains the information-theory reasoning behind the design.

Street interviews of over 50 passersby in Times Square, asked what a browser is. Many answers show people confuse browsers with search engines or the internet.

A short Dyalog demonstration building Conway's Game of Life in a single line of APL, step by step. It shows how array operations replace loops.

The first lecture of MIT's 1986 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, given by Harold Abelson, introducing Lisp and the idea of computer science as the study of process.

Hans Rosling uses the Gapminder animated-data tool to debunk myths about world development, with sportscaster-like energy. It shows trends in health, income and child survival across countries.

Cal Henderson's DjangoCon 2008 keynote, "Why I Hate Django", is a funny critique of Django from a Flickr architect. It touches on scaling topics such as database replication.

Robert Martin's RailsConf 2009 talk looks at why Smalltalk lost out despite its technical strengths. He draws lessons about language communities and arrogance that he argues could hurt Ruby too.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk in which Slava Pestov introduces Factor, a concatenative language influenced by Forth, Lisp and Smalltalk. It covers the interactive environment, metaprogramming, and the language's modern high-level features and libraries.

In this TED talk, Hans Rosling uses animated statistics to debunk myths about the developing world, showing how health and income have improved across countries.

The Google I/O 2009 keynote introducing Google Wave, a real-time collaborative communication and document platform. It includes a long live demo and the developer preview announcement.

The first lecture of Stanford's CS107 Programming Paradigms, taught by Jerry Cain, giving an overview of the course. The course goes from C and assembly through C++, concurrency, Scheme and Python.

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk argues for rethinking networking around named data rather than host-to-host connections. He gives the history and the unsolved problems of the current internet architecture.

The American Museum of Natural History's film flies from the Himalayas out through the atmosphere and solar system to the afterglow of the Big Bang, using its Digital Universe Atlas four-dimensional map.

An episode of the comedic You Suck at Photoshop series in which Donnie Hoyle teaches distort, warp and layer effects while vandalizing a Vanagon in the image. It won Webby awards as a how-to and comedy series.

A short video built around an animation of the roughly 10,000 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, placed at their measured redshift distances. It gives a brief history of deep field images and ends with a 3D fly-through.

Sean Parent of Adobe argues that object-oriented frameworks ultimately fail to deliver scalable, high quality software and proposes combining generic and declarative programming instead. It draws on Stepanov's Elements of Programming.

Jon Bentley walks through three implementations of Hoare's Quicksort, from a dozen-line C function to a series of systematic code transformations that make the program ever simpler and more powerful. It is a Google Tech Talk on code elegance and program derivation.

A 1996 clip of Steve Jobs saying that Microsoft lacks taste and is not a creative company.

Joel Spolsky's 2009 Google Tech Talk on why StackOverflow was built, how it addresses the mess of searching for programming help, and the community design behind it. He also takes jabs at paywalled answer sites.

A concept video from 2003 showing an early vision of Windows Longhorn's interface, before it shipped as Vista.