developer tools

Yegor Denisov-Blanch of Stanford presents a study of nearly 100,000 developers at hundreds of companies, measuring how AI affects productivity from commit data. It finds an average boost of about 20% with wide variance by codebase, task complexity and stack.

Greg Law's 15-minute CppCon 2015 lightning talk shows what GDB can do beyond basic use, including its text user interface and reverse debugging.

A reverse engineer walks through fixing a ten-year-old bug in Guitar Hero III without access to its source code, using a disassembler and decompiler. It is technical but explained step by step.

A short !!Con 2016 talk by blind developer Sina Bahram on how he uses a computer and writes code with a screen reader at about 1,000 words per minute. He plays how common interfaces sound and challenges the audience to go a day using only the keyboard.

A seven-minute Google I/O 2014 talk by Simon Newton on how developers can make use of Google's global network. It describes the network's footprint and some of the services running on it.

Bret Victor's talk proposing a new kind of maker space built for seeing and understanding a project's behavior: inside it, across time and across possibilities. It argues for scientific understanding over recipes and rules of thumb.

Anders Hejlsberg introduces the native port of the TypeScript compiler, written in Go, which promises roughly 10x faster tooling. He demos compiling VS Code and explains where the speedup comes from.

A five-minute lightning talk from React.js Conf 2016 by Elie Rotenberg on protecting the DOM from tampering. It shows how React tree obfuscation (react-armor) can shuffle class names, tags and tree structure to defeat CSS-selector-based ad blocking.

A clean-audio clip from Apple's 1997 WWDC where Steve Jobs answers a hostile question from a developer about OpenDoc. He argues you must start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.

Tom Scott explains how he built his emoji keyboard, which turned out to be a series of bodged-together tools including AutoHotkey and LuaMacros. He tells stories about the value of quick-and-dirty solutions.

Gary Bernhardt argues that software history moves in reactions to earlier tools, and that new tools are not simply better in every way. He distinguishes capability (what a tool allows) from suitability (what it fits), and warns against repeating past mistaken reactions.

A React Conf talk by Xuan Huang previewing React Forget, a compiler that automatically memoizes components. It argues for making memoization the default so developers need not write useMemo or useCallback by hand.

Andrej Karpathy's Databricks talk on Software 2.0, the shift from human-written code to code produced by neural network training. It covers how developer work moves toward curating datasets, the advantages and challenges, and opportunities for new tooling.

Marcin Jakubowski of Open Source Ecology presents his plan to open-source blueprints for 50 cheap, buildable farming tools, a "civilization starter kit". He argues that opening the means of production can enable self-sustaining lives.