frontend tooling

Cheng Lou's react-europe 2016 talk lays out a mental framework for thinking about abstraction levels in JavaScript tooling, from Angular and Grunt to Webpack and React. It uses that framework to reason about the cost of abstractions and how to choose between competing solutions.

Steve Yegge's Stanford seminar on GROK, Google's internal large-scale, cross-language source code analysis system. It covers how the system helps with code search and understanding across Google's huge codebase.

A one-hour OCaml Workshop 2020 talk on the state of the OCaml Platform, covering IDE support, next steps for the tooling and plans for 2020-2021.

Destin Sandlin tours a progressive metal stamping factory, showing machines that stamp millions of metal parts and the tooling behind them.

Svelte creator Rich Harris explains moving reactivity into the compiler and language rather than tracking state at runtime, with a history of spreadsheets as reactive systems and comparisons to React.

Allan Blomquist demonstrates the internal programming and debugging tools Tomorrow Corporation uses to make games, including live modification of a running game and time-travel debugging.

A short screencast tour of JSPM, SystemJS and ES6 features, building a small app with the then-new JavaScript module and package tooling. It shows how JSPM works as a package manager, bundler and loader.

Wes Bos breaks down the techniques behind the McMaster-Carr website's speed: server-rendered HTML, prefetching, CDN and service worker caching, preloading, critical CSS and fixed-size images. He also notes its old-school jQuery and YUI JavaScript.

A PyData London 2018 talk on how JPMorgan scaled its Athena Python platform over ten years to about 35 million lines of code and thousands of developers. It covers infrastructure, tooling and culture for analytics and visualization at that scale.

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.

Martin Odersky's JVM Language Summit 2015 talk argues that compilers can be thought of as databases. It describes design ideas for the Scala compiler and for developer tools.

Bret Victor's DBX 2013 talk, delivered in the guise of a 1973 IBM engineer with an overhead projector. It surveys forgotten ideas from 1960s and early 70s computing and warns against assuming you know what you're doing.

Pete Hunt of Facebook and Instagram introduces React at JSConf EU 2013 and explains its design principles. He argues that separating templates from logic only separates technologies, not concerns, and makes the case for components.

The first three talks from React Conf 2018, by Sophie Alpert, Dan Abramov and Ryan Florence. They introduce React Hooks and explain the problems with classes that hooks solve.

Anders Hejlsberg whiteboards how compilers are taught versus how modern ones are actually built. He explains the shift to compilers as services with incremental, error-tolerant, IDE-oriented design, as in Roslyn and TypeScript.

LearnCode.academy presents a roadmap of web development technologies to learn in 2016 and 2017, spanning front-end, back-end and DevOps tools.

A 1991 NeXT promotional video that stages a head-to-head programming contest between a NeXT computer and a Sun workstation. It shows NeXT's interface builder and object-oriented tooling producing an application far faster than traditional UNIX development.

Richard Feldman's Elm Europe 2017 talk on how to structure and scale large Elm applications, including when to nest messages.

A Lex Fridman podcast conversation with the four creators of Cursor, the AI-assisted code editor. They discuss how the editor integrates models into programming workflows, including custom completion models and techniques like speculative decoding to speed up applying edits.

Nicholas Zakas of Yahoo discusses architecture for large, modular JavaScript web applications. He lays out the theory behind building front ends that scale in complexity.

Andrew Rota of Wayfair argues at React.js Conf 2015 that React and native Web Components complement each other. He shows how they can be combined for complex web applications.

Ben Alpert of the React team talks at React.js Conf 2016 about where React is heading. He covers performance and stability work, challenges at Facebook, and opportunities such as bringing React Native ideas to the web.

A one-minute demo of Safespaces, an open source 3D and VR desktop built on the Arcan project.

Tim Ewald's Clojure/conj talk uses furniture making with hand tools versus machine tools as an allegory for software. It explores how automation changes what we make and how we think about our work, and why Clojure's small set of simple tools matters.

Ruby developer Avdi Grimm gives a seven-minute tour of Pharo Smalltalk's development environment, focusing on tools like search-by-example and the integrated, live coding experience.

Jack Rusher's Strange Loop 2022 talk argues that most programming languages are still designed around punchcard-era assumptions. He makes the case for live, interactive programming environments, drawing on Lisp, Smalltalk and REPL-driven development.

Titus Winters' CppCon 2017 talk argues for C++ and Google's Abseil to be maintained as a live at head language, relying on testing and automated tooling rather than never changing or promising no compatibility. It covers Hyrum's law and the limits of semantic versioning.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day tries to manufacture a grill scrubber entirely in the United States. Along the way he runs into missing supply chains, tooling and institutional manufacturing knowledge.

Oskar Stalberg explains how Wave Function Collapse assembles island dioramas from handcrafted tilesets in Bad North. He covers the theory, implementation, tooling, and how he blends art and technology.

A 2018 GDC talk by NetherRealm's Michael Stallone on the engine changes, optimizations and tooling needed to roll back and re-simulate up to 8 frames in 16 ms in Mortal Kombat and Injustice 2. It is a deep dive into deterministic rollback netcode.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2015 plenary on writing safe, modern C++ by default using the C++ Core Guidelines. It includes a demo of lifetime-checking static analysis tooling.

Casey Muratori gives a fast tour of the RemedyBG debugger for Windows, which he uses daily. He shows its speed and features, especially the watch window.

James Long's dotJS 2019 talk on how CRDTs enable local-first apps and how simple they can be to implement. He shows how to use them to build robust offline-capable frontends.

Andrej Karpathy walks through how GPT assistants are trained, from tokenization and pretraining to supervised finetuning and RLHF, and gives practical prompting strategies and a view of the tooling ecosystem.

Derek Slager's Clojure/conj talk argues that ClojureScript is a pragmatic choice for web development. He addresses common objections, recent improvements, tooling and use cases where it shines.

A five-hour Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack covering Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, programming, games and rockets.

Avi Bryant demos Dabble DB, a web-based spreadsheet-like database for building apps without code. It shows how users can model and relate data through a smooth interface.

Dr Mike Pound of Computerphile shows how a modern laptop can crack Enigma, using a ciphertext-only attack based on an older paper. He compares it with the tooling in CrypTool.

Rachel Potvin describes the scale of Google's codebase and its custom monolithic source repository. She explains the reasons for the monorepo model, the tooling that makes it workable, and its tradeoffs.

Frederick Raynal gives a GDC postmortem of Alone in the Dark, the game that helped create the survival horror genre. He covers how the team built it and shows some of the old tools used.