insight

Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes watching her own brain functions shut down during a massive stroke. She gives a first-person account of losing speech, motion and self-awareness.

Peter Shor tells the story of how he discovered Shor's Algorithm, from his early mathematics days to the quantum factoring breakthrough. It was recorded at MIT at the Physics of Computation conference.

David Rock gives a Google Tech Talk based on his book Your Brain at Work, using neuroscience to explain why focus and productivity are hard at the office. He gives strategies for managing mental energy and distraction.

Historian Doron Swade tells the story of Charles Babbage's quest to build the Difference Engine and the construction of Difference Engine No. 2 at the Science Museum. The talk covers Babbage's motivation, his machines and Ada Lovelace's insight into the Analytical Engine.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, discusses the hard parts of running an open source project: online community conflict, why its patterns arise, and a cultural history of open source. He offers ideas for more civil, productive communication.

Bungie's David Aldridge explains the networking programming behind Halo: Reach in a 2011 GDC session. It covers how gameplay stays in sync online, including forecasting and state reconciliation.

Excerpts from Linus Torvalds's DebConf 14 talk on why desktop Linux struggles. He covers application distribution, distros breaking backwards compatibility, wasted package management effort and how Windows does app distribution better.

Stuart Halloway's satirical talk describes how to protect yourself from industry change by spreading complexity through systems while following idiomatic practice. It uses this inversion to catalog software design anti-patterns.

Jon Moore's Strange Loop 2017 talk argues that rate limiting is the wrong tool for protecting services from noisy clients. He proposes concurrency-based capacity management and quotas instead.

Travis Kalanick's talk at FailCon 2011 about his earlier failed startups, given as a case study before Uber's rise. It describes lessons from those ventures.

Benno Rice's linux.conf.au 2020 talk asks whether UNIX was the best design we could have had. He looks at what alternatives existed, what was gained and lost, and what could be re-learned, including the limits of treating everything as a file.

Robert Bussard's 2006 Google Tech Talk on inertial electrostatic confinement fusion, a compact approach he argued could be cheap and clean, using boron-hydrogen fuel without neutron radiation. It runs about 93 minutes and covers the physics, funding history and his proposed development path.

David Brevik's GDC 2016 post-mortem of the original Diablo, covering how it evolved from a turn-based claymation DOS game into the genre-defining action RPG. It includes development anecdotes and lessons learned.

Kiran Pamnany's Cambridge Julia Meetup talk on Julia's shared memory parallelism and its new task scheduler. It argues that fork-join and work-stealing models nest poorly and presents depth-first scheduling for composable parallelism.

Sam Aaron, creator of Sonic Pi, gives a demo-heavy GOTO Chicago 2018 talk on live coding music. He covers the history of Sonic Pi, how it evolved, and what it can do for education and professional musicians.

John Carmack's keynote at Oculus Connect 2014 about the Gear VR and development stories from building it. He discusses mobile GPU optimization, latency, and display ideas like programmable interlacing.

Jonathan Blow gives a roughly 90-minute talk, followed by Q&A, on how video games could actually improve education, in contrast to what is currently being tried.

Douglas Crockford's YUIConf 2011 keynote on why programming style matters, particularly in JavaScript. He draws on science about the brain and shows how tools like JSLint help.

Anna Rosling Rönnlund presents Dollar Street, a project photographing homes in dozens of countries, from stoves to beds to toilets, and sorting them by income. She shows how data visualization can change how we see the world.

Peter Hutterer's linux.conf.au 2020 talk on creating libinput, the unified userspace input library, and the difficulties of handling the many quirks of input devices.

The Mentor (Loyd Blankenship) reads his 1986 essay "The Conscience of a Hacker" at H2K2 in 2002 and adds his own insight about its backstory.

Glenn Vanderburg presents Cló, a Clojure library that reimplements TeX's core typesetting algorithms as composable functions. He shows what translating procedural, literate-programming code into functional form teaches.

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.

Brian Bucklew of Freehold Games discusses design decisions behind Caves of Qud and Sproggiwood at IRDC 2015. The talk centers on data-driven, event-driven engine design.

Scott Galloway's DLD15 talk assessing the competitive positions of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. He argues about where each is strong and weak, including Amazon's need for physical retail.