infrastructure

A John Oliver Last Week Tonight segment on America's crumbling infrastructure and why maintenance is neglected and underfunded. It mixes comedy with real examples such as aging bridges and dams.

A short BicycleDutch episode showing how people with disabilities use Dutch cycle tracks on hand-cycles, tricycles and mobility scooters.

James Hamilton of AWS gives a Velocity 2010 keynote on datacenter infrastructure innovation, focused on power and cooling costs and a breakdown of where datacenter spending goes.

Kyle Drake of Neocities explains the bandwidth pricing pitfalls of the big cloud providers. He describes how to run high-volume, bandwidth-heavy infrastructure far more cheaply, including through co-location.

An F8 2015 talk touring the tool-chain Facebook uses to let thousands of engineers build mobile apps, including its move to Mercurial, an Atom-based IDE and continuous integration.

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.

A documentary on how Cornwall became a hub for the world's communications, from the first transatlantic radio signal to modern undersea fibre cables. It describes how cable landing stations and the systems are put together.

James Hamilton, AWS VP and distinguished engineer, gives an insider view of the innovations behind the AWS cloud at re:Invent 2014. He covers custom hardware, networking, regions and availability zones, and infrastructure at scale.

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.

A five-minute BicycleDutch episode showing how Dutch junctions are designed so cyclists and pedestrians can cross safely. It explains the layout choices that separate and protect them.

A short BicycleDutch video on how the Netherlands got its cycling infrastructure, including the 1970s protests and the shift away from car-centric planning. The channel later published an updated version.

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.

James Hamilton's Tuesday Night Live keynote at AWS re:Invent 2016, touring AWS infrastructure at scale including networking, power and custom silicon. It also features NASA JPL's Tom Soderstrom.

A Wendover Productions explainer on how China built the world's largest high-speed rail network so quickly and why its rail strategy differs from America's. It covers politics, social benefits and the economics of unprofitable lines.

Kelsey Hightower introduces Kubernetes to sysadmins at PuppetConf 2016, with a demo. He explains the declarative model and how it changes the contract between infrastructure and applications.

Nine minutes of unedited footage of a very busy bicycle and car crossing at Korte Prinsengracht and Haarlemmerstraat in Amsterdam. Cyclists, pedestrians and cars flow through without traffic lights.

A half-hour television special on the 2007 fiery collapse of a connector in the Bay Area's MacArthur Maze and its rebuilding in 26 days. It was produced for the Professional Engineers in California Government.

Richard Ankrom's account of his 2001 guerrilla project, in which he painted and installed a missing freeway exit sign on a Pasadena freeway. The sign matched official standards and stayed up for years before being discovered.

Tom Scott visits Peachtree City, Georgia, which has about a hundred miles of dedicated golf cart paths that serve as an alternative to driving. He explains how the network works as a quasi-transit system that keeps cars off the roads.

Joe Kava, VP of Google's Data Center Operations, gives a short tour of a Google data center. He covers security, sustainability and the core infrastructure architecture.

A short Streetfilms montage of Vredenburg in Utrecht, a car-free street carrying about 33,000 cyclists a day. It shows heavy bike traffic alongside pedestrians and buses.

Urs Hoelzle, Google's SVP of infrastructure, gives the 2012 Open Networking Summit keynote on how Google adopted OpenFlow and software-defined networking in its own networks. The slides are linked in the description.

Isaac Arthur explains the orbital ring, a megastructure launch-assist system that could move bulk cargo cheaply to orbit and beyond. He compares it with space elevators and discusses power transmission.

Rick Reed of WhatsApp speaks at MeetBSD about running a messaging service on FreeBSD and Erlang at huge scale. He covers the stack, tuning and the challenges of millions of connections per host.

A short BicycleDutch episode showing Vredenburg in Utrecht, the busiest cycle path in the Netherlands, with about 37,000 cyclists passing on a working day.

Streetfilms shows how Utrecht reduced car traffic in its center by removing roadways, building huge bike parking near the train station, and making cycling transitions safer and easier.

A short BicycleDutch episode showing how Dutch protected intersections continue cycle paths through the junction without needing extra street width.

A 39-minute BBC documentary, built from earlier British Transport Films footage, on how the London Underground's Victoria Line was dug in the 1960s.

An AWS re:Invent 2014 talk on the core distributed systems primitives behind AWS and Amazon.com, such as consensus, key-value stores and transactional logging. It describes how AWS builds large services from a few common building blocks.

A sped-up two-minute view of morning rush hour at a busy Utrecht junction, where thousands of bicycles and buses pass each day. It illustrates a city where about a third of trips are by bike.

A short BicycleDutch episode showing how Dutch junctions with protected cycle paths are laid out. It argues these are proven, non-experimental designs that make intersections safer for cyclists.

Footage of a doubleheader of locomotives crawling over badly maintained track on a former Wabash Railroad line, now the ND&W Railway. The uploader explains the track had deferred maintenance for decades.

Tom Scott writes a more honest VPN ad, with the sponsor's name redacted, and explains why the typical claims in VPN advertising are misleading. He notes the sponsor was not happy about it.

John Oliver's 13-minute Last Week Tonight segment explains the 2014 net neutrality fight over cable companies creating unequal internet speeds. It uses comedy to make a dull regulatory topic engaging and tells viewers how to comment to the FCC.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how Unicode and UTF-8 grew out of messy older character encodings to become the web's standard. It covers why the design works and how it handles worldwide text.

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.

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk on rethinking networking around named content instead of host-to-host conversations. He recounts packet-networking history and lays out the content-centric networking idea that later became NDN.

Real Engineering explains why SpaceX is building Starlink, including the economics of satellite internet. It covers the latency advantage of light in vacuum over fiber for long-distance links.

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.

A lightning-style conference talk by Ricardo Signes about the horrors of email: its protocols, formats and decades of accumulated quirks. It is delivered with a humorous horror theme to show why handling email correctly is harder than it looks.