important problems

Rafal Dittwald's Clojure/north talk shows how to move from writing Java-style code in Clojure to thinking in data-driven, functional terms. He walks through a JavaScript example, refactoring imperative code step by step into a functional core.

A 36C3 talk by Bunnie Huang arguing that open source is necessary but not sufficient for trustworthy hardware, because verifying hardware is destructive and so creates a time-of-check/time-of-use gap. It surveys supply chain security and classes of hardware attacks, and presents the Betrusted approach to narrowing that gap.

Chris Seaton talks about JRuby+Truffle, explaining how the Truffle and Graal combination optimises the tricky parts of Ruby and why it outperforms other Ruby implementations.

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.

John Graham-Cumming of Cloudflare talks at dotScale 2015 about handling roughly 10 trillion log lines a month. The talk touches on Cloudflare's hardware, its logging stack and its use of Lua in Nginx.

Steve Yegge's OSCON Data 2011 talk imagines what you could do with Google-scale storage and compute a decade later. He argues smart people should work on hard problems such as biology rather than cat pictures, and the talk ends with a moment many took as him quitting Google.

Ed Catmull of Pixar speaks at Stanford's 2007 Entrepreneurship Conference on running a creative company. He argues for surfacing small problems early and building good teams, with stories like the Toy Story 2 crunch.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) traces the history of software from 1948 to today, looking at the problems programmers faced, how they were solved, and what mistakes the profession made. He then projects where the field is going, including professionalism and regulation.

Rich Hickey's philosophical talk from the first Clojure Conj in 2010. He argues that good design comes from deliberate, away-from-keyboard thinking, and describes how to feed the background mind so it solves problems.

Jonathan Blow's first talk on designing a new programming language for games, which became Jai. He explains the problems with C++ and why Go, Rust and D do not fit game development.

Rob Pike's Google I/O 2012 talk shows how goroutines and channels solve tricky concurrency problems with simple Go code. It features a playful goroutine demo with gophers passing messages and a search engine example.

Dan Geer's Black Hat 2014 keynote argues that cybersecurity is a matter of power and policy rather than wishful thinking. He covers surveillance, the vulnerability market, software liability and privacy as the capacity to misrepresent yourself.

Okta developer advocate Nate Barbettini explains OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect in a roughly hour-long talk. It starts from the problems the protocols solve and walks through the flows. The description notes the implicit flow material is now out of date.

A short clip of Dr. Robert Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars, answering why humanity should go to Mars. He argues that societies grow by challenging themselves and that exploration inspires young people.

Brandon Rhodes' PyOhio 2014 talk on applying the Clean Architecture in Python. He shows how this high-level design pattern fits Python's features and addresses maintainability problems in large applications.

Felienne Hermans argues that Excel is the world's most popular programming language and shows how spreadsheets work as a pure functional language. She implements a few mathematical problems in spreadsheet formulas to illustrate why they are so powerful and approachable.

Larry Hastings explains what Python's GIL is, what problems it solves and how it works, and presents his Gilectomy project to remove it, including the performance and C-extension obstacles.

Dropbox engineer Kevin Modzelewski gives a Stanford colloquium on Dropbox's history and the technical problems it faced scaling, including detailed database schema decisions.

Facebook engineers explain why they abandoned the traditional MVC paradigm for a more functional architecture, introducing Flux and React. They use the unread-message-count bug as a case study of the problems of bidirectional data flow at scale.

Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure and designer of Datomic, gives a JaxConf 2012 talk that takes apart traditional database architecture. He presents a different way to think about databases and explains the reasoning behind Datomic's fact-based design.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2016 talk on lifetime safety in C++, aiming for code free of leaks and dangling pointers by default. It covers smart pointers, ownership, reference counting pitfalls and deferred reclamation resembling garbage collection.

Scott Wlaschin demystifies functional programming terms like monads, monoids, functors and catamorphisms by showing how they fit into a small toolkit. He applies them to problems such as missing data, list handling, and functional dependency injection.

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.

Guy Steele's PPoPP 2017 keynote surveying the history of computer science metanotation, including BNF, inference rules, and overline notation. He argues the field's notations are inconsistent and fragmented.

A JSConf 2014 talk visually breaking down algorithms behind everyday UI patterns, such as dropdown menus that vanish when the mouse drifts and picking the nearest target to the cursor. It shows how these are implemented in JavaScript.

Eric Brandwine's AWS re:Invent 2015 session on how Amazon VPC networking works. It covers the problems the design solved, why traditional approaches do not scale, and the mechanisms used for customer isolation and VPC endpoints.

Elasticsearch engineer and Lucene committer Adrien Grand explains the design decisions inside a Lucene index and what problems it can and cannot solve. The talk goes into how Lucene stores data for fast search and analytics.

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.

An RSA Animate adaptation of a Slavoj Zizek talk on charitable giving and ethical consumerism. It argues that buying products that bundle a charity donation can sustain the system that causes the problems.

Chandler Carruth walks through tuning C++ performance, from writing benchmarks to analyzing results on real CPUs and compilers. It focuses on small-scale problems such as loop kernels, data structures and algorithms, and on keeping compilers from optimizing benchmarks away.

A long information session where The Boring Company presents its vision for Loop, an underground high-speed transit system, and the traffic problems it aims to solve. It includes discussion of faster tunnel boring and electrification.

Bob Beck of OpenBSD gives a BSDCan 2014 talk on the first month of LibreSSL, the OpenSSL fork. He explains why they forked, what they removed, and examples of the problems found in the OpenSSL code base.

Joe Armstrong's GOTO 2018 talk contrasts the problems computer scientists study with the problems users have. He revisits forgotten great ideas such as tuple spaces, flow-based programming, Xanadu and Unix pipes, with anecdotes.

Deviant Ollam gives a long talk on risk and preparedness: get a lawyer, passport, locksmith and other resources before you need them. It covers practical steps to build defenses against serious problems in life.

Paul Phillips, a major Scala compiler contributor, gives a long talk on Scala collections and views, using it to critique Scala's design and direction.

Conrad Wolfram argues that the part of math taught in schools, hand calculation, is tedious and mostly irrelevant to real mathematics. He proposes teaching math through computer programming so students can tackle real problems.

Moxie Marlinspike's 36C3 talk examines why distributed and decentralized technology is hard to build into consumer products, from the perspective of developing Signal. It argues that ecosystems move slowly and federation causes problems.

A dotScale 2014 talk by Robert Kennedy, a former healthcare.gov SRE who later worked at Google, about the engineering effort to rescue the troubled site. It explains the technical and organizational problems behind the failed launch.

Jonathan Blow's LambdaConf 2025 keynote demonstrates the Jai programming language and explains its design. It includes demos of metaprogramming and tools that visualize programs.

Julia co-creator Jeff Bezanson candidly lists fundamental problems with the language at JuliaCon 2019, including modularity, types and compiler latency, and how they might be solved.