from scratch

Designer Thomas Thwaites describes his attempt to build a toaster from scratch, from mining ore and deriving plastic from oil. It is a short TED talk on how much civilization a simple object depends on.

Liz Rice builds a container from scratch in about 100 lines of Go, showing that a container is not a lightweight VM but a set of Linux kernel features and flags.

Liz Rice live-codes a minimal container runtime in a few lines of Go at GOTO Amsterdam 2018. She explains namespaces, control groups and what a host knows about its containers.

A HOPE X talk giving an in-depth explanation of how elevators work, from their history in hacker culture to using their control systems to bypass building security. It covers features and abilities of elevators that most people never see.

Fedor Pikus's CppCon 2017 talk on C++ atomics, looking at what they let the programmer express and what the hardware actually does. It covers memory ordering and lock-free programming from basic to advanced.

UC Berkeley EECS colloquium by OpenAI's John Schulman on reinforcement learning from human feedback. He covers why RL helps with truthfulness, hallucination, and the limits of behavior cloning.

A Cincinnati Ruby meetup talk by Jim Weirich on decoupling application logic from Rails. He argues for separating business logic from framework and database models.

A HOPE09 talk on how modern computer chips are manufactured, from 22nm transistors to ultra-clean fabs and the tricks used to pattern tiny features with light. It frames chipmaking as hacking electrical engineering and physics.

Deviant Ollam's two-hour conference talk explains how elevators work, from the pit and buffers to the car top, controller logic and access-control features. It shows how this knowledge can be used for optimization and for bypassing building security.

Bruce Dang of Microsoft gives a 27C3 talk on how the Stuxnet vulnerabilities were found and analyzed. He walks through the techniques used to triage them and the details of each zero-day exploit, down to the opcode level.

Deviant Ollam and Howard Payne give an in-depth DEF CON 22 explanation of how elevators work, from the pit to the penthouse. It covers their control modes and how pen testers use elevators to bypass building security.

A 38C3 talk on how advanced chips are made, centered on EUV lithography and the global supply chain behind it. It covers technical challenges from raw materials to finished chips and the geopolitical weight of semiconductors.

Jason Scott's DerbyCon 2012 talk on rescuing the Prince of Persia source code from old floppy disks, working with the game's author Jordan Mechner. It is a story of digital archaeology and recovering data from ancient media.

David Guillot describes how his team replaced a two-year-old React UI of their SaaS product with Django templates and htmx in a couple of months. The talk gives concrete indicators on code size, performance and team impact.

Kirk Sorensen's Google Tech Talk on liquid-fluoride thorium reactors, a design that could burn nuclear waste and use thorium as fuel. It draws on Oak Ridge National Laboratory work from the 1950s and 60s.

Mike Rowe, host of Dirty Jobs, shares stories from messy real-world jobs in this TED talk. He argues that hard work has been unjustly degraded in society.

Moxie Marlinspike's DEF CON 18 talk argues that privacy threats have shifted from centralized state databases like TIA to corporate data collection by companies like Google, despite wins in strong cryptography and decentralization.

Jérôme Petazzoni explains how Linux containers are built from kernel features like cgroups, namespaces and SELinux. He demonstrates putting the pieces together by hand to make a container and compares runtimes and approaches like jails and zones.

George Hotz of Comma AI gives a 2017 conference talk on lessons from building a self-driving system. He argues about how driving should be defined and why the common approach to autonomous vehicles is flawed.

Clinical psychologist Dr Michael Yapko draws on forty years of practice and research to explain skills that help people recover from, and even prevent, depression. He emphasizes cognitive and social factors beyond medication.

Jon Purdy's Stanford EE380 seminar giving an overview of concatenative programming, from function composition theory and history down to low-level implementation and correctness benefits.

Aditya Siram argues that functional programming has much to learn from Smalltalk's interactivity, using Pharo and Squeak to show live, visual, explorable programming environments.

Tef's EMF 2012 talk on lessons from a career in programming, a candid and humorous look at why programming is so often terrible. Slides and a draft script are available online.

Peter Norvig's 2007 Google talk on theorizing from data, covering what huge datasets can do for language understanding, translation, information extraction and inference. It argues that more data often beats cleverer models.

Jean-Marc Jancovici gives an MIT Media Lab talk on whether technology can save us from climate change. He argues from a physical view of energy that economic growth, energy use and climate impact are tightly linked.

Sasa Juric explains how to parse a language from first principles without regexes, live-coding a simple parser combinator library in Elixir. It was given at WebCamp Zagreb 2019.

Bret Copeland, in an astronaut costume, gives an energetic talk on how the Space Shuttle landed from orbit, including reentry and the unpowered glide. It includes real-time landing footage with HUD and audio.

JPL's David Cummings presents at the 2025 Flight Software Workshop how the team diagnosed and fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 anomaly from billions of miles away. It walks through the flight computer and the memory fix.

Hyrum Wright shares lessons from five years of mass code migrations in Google's huge C++ codebase. He covers why to migrate, how hard it really is, and how Google updates core libraries and their users continually.

Psychiatrist Daniel Amen discusses lessons from 83,000 brain scans, arguing that brain activity patterns relate to psychological symptoms and that you can improve your brain.

Paul Irish walks through the jQuery source code and shares ten lessons and interesting techniques from it, aimed at JavaScript developers who want to learn from a widely used library.

Clayton Christensen speaks at Google on where growth comes from, covering disruption, market-creating versus efficiency innovation, and jobs to be done. He also touches on measuring your life.

Steven Johnson's TED talk argues that good ideas come from connected, slow-building hunches and liquid networks, from London coffee houses to Darwin to the modern web, rather than lone Eureka moments.

Chandler Carruth's CppNow 2023 talk describes Carbon as a successor language to C++ rather than a superset, focusing on C++ interop and a path to memory safety in large existing codebases. It explains why Carbon takes a different approach from Cpp2 and Circle.

Former bank regulator William Black explains how fraud, including liar's loans, was committed from inside banks and drove the 2008 financial crisis.

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.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks at Google about his book Antifragile, on systems that gain from disorder and volatility. It draws on themes from his earlier books.

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.

Seattle landscape architect Fred Young gives an hour-long visual tour of Dutch cycling infrastructure, covering design details, continuous networks and how cycling fits daily life in the Netherlands.

Media Molecule's Alex Evans recounts the journey, including the failures, of finding the Dreams engine, based on his Siggraph 2015 talk. It covers the signed-distance-field and splat-based rendering approach and the artistic goals behind it.