interactive development

Elias Martenson presents his Emacs-based workflow for building a web application (the Potato chat platform) with Common Lisp on the backend and ClojureScript on the frontend. He demonstrates SLIME, Paredit, CIDER and debugger-driven interactive development. The talk is 79 minutes and was given at Emacs SG.

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.

Valve's two-hour documentary for Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary, with team members discussing development, nearly running out of money, being hacked, the publisher lawsuit and the birth of Steam.

David Brevik's GDC 2016 postmortem of Diablo covers how it went from a turn-based claymation DOS concept to a real-time action RPG, plus the story of Blizzard North and development anecdotes.

Chris McCord's ElixirConf EU 2019 keynote introducing Phoenix LiveView, which builds interactive server-rendered apps without writing JavaScript. It explains how only changed dynamic parts are sent over a websocket.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk in which Slava Pestov introduces Factor, a concatenative language influenced by Forth, Lisp and Smalltalk. It covers the interactive environment, metaprogramming, and the language's modern high-level features and libraries.

A 2023 University of Toronto conversation between Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li on responsible AI development. They look back at the history of deep learning and ImageNet and discuss the ethics and risks of AI.

Lex Fridman interviews MIT physicist Max Tegmark, co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, about the case for pausing giant AI experiments and the risks of advanced AI.

A Curry On talk by Lars Bak, known for V8 and Dart, on building a secure and robust IoT development platform. It discusses language and VM design choices for small devices.

Bryan Cantrill's LISA11 talk on how illumos arose after Oracle closed OpenSolaris. It covers the history of Sun, ZFS, DTrace and Zones, and the diaspora of kernel engineers, with a famous rant about Oracle and Larry Ellison.

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.

Jason Scott discusses making his documentary GET LAMP at a Google Tech Talk and screens part of the film. It covers the history of text adventures and interactive fiction, with interviews of Infocom developers and others.

A roughly 75-minute video essay from Ahoy's RetroAhoy series on the making and history of The Secret of Monkey Island. It covers the small LucasArts team, the game's development and its sequel.

Jonathan Blow's hour-long livestreamed response to a RustConf 2018 closing keynote about entity systems in Rust. He argues that index-based entity systems amount to manual memory management that sidesteps the borrow checker, and he talks about friction for game developers.

Sean Parent of Adobe argues that object-oriented frameworks ultimately fail to deliver scalable, high quality software and proposes combining generic and declarative programming instead. It draws on Stepanov's Elements of Programming.

Geoff Hinton's 2010 Google Tech Talk on deep belief networks, learning layers of representation one at a time from unlabeled data, and extending them with multiplicative interactions.

Mike Acton, in a HandmadeCon 2015 interview with Casey Muratori, discusses game engine development, hiring and learning on your own.

SpaceX's September 2019 Starship update presentation, where Elon Musk describes the design and development of Starship and Super Heavy. It covers construction and plans for reusable orbital rockets.

Dr. Russell Barkley's roughly three-hour lecture on ADHD for parents of affected children. It explains what ADHD is and how the ADHD brain differs.

Ian Cooper's DevTernity talk revisits Kent Beck's original TDD ideas and shows where misunderstandings crept in. It argues tests should target behaviors through public interfaces rather than implementation details, so suites support refactoring instead of resisting it.

Jonathan Blow speaks at UC Berkeley's CSUA about how to program independent games. He argues for keeping code simple, avoiding unnecessary work, and shipping.

Jonathan Blow's DevGAMM 2019 talk argues that software knowledge is being lost between generations and that growing layers of abstraction could lead to a decline in technological civilization.

John Carmack's long QuakeCon 2012 keynote, a free-ranging talk covering software engineering, game platforms, game streaming, and his early head-mounted display and VR work.

A live mock programmer interview in which Casey Muratori interviews game developer Shawn McGrath using a less confrontational format devised by Chris Hecker. It gets deep into technical details while showing how the candidate actually thinks and works.

Curt Jaimungal interviews biologist Michael Levin of Tufts about consciousness, bioelectricity, emergence, and cancer research. The conversation challenges reductionist views of life.

DHH's opening keynote at Rails World 2024 in Toronto, where Rails 8 beta shipped. It covers built-in authentication, Propshaft, Solid Cache, Solid Queue, Solid Cable, Kamal 2 and Thruster, pitching the One Person Framework that needs no PaaS.

GDC 2019 session where Insomniac's David Santiago describes the procedural systems used to build Manhattan for Marvel's Spider-Man. It covers the open-world pipeline and how each system was designed to support iteration and dependencies.

John Carmack's keynote at QuakeCon 2011, an hour and a half of wide-ranging talk about id Software, Rage, engine open-sourcing, patents and programming practices.

Michael Levin presents his lab's work on how cellular collectives use bioelectric networks to make anatomical decisions. Topics include pattern memories, regeneration and synthetic living organisms.

In the finale of Double Fine's Devs Play, speedrunner SMK demonstrates glitches and exploits that skip entire sections of Psychonauts while Tim Schafer and the dev team watch. The developers react to and discuss the bugs as they appear.

Eric Chahi's GDC 2011 postmortem of Another World (Out of This World), describing how he built the game. He shows his polygon art approach, rotoscoping and animation tools.

Ubisoft procedural technical artist Etienne Carrier explains the Houdini-based tools used to build Far Cry 5's roughly 100 square km open world. It covers generating biomes, texturing terrain, freshwater networks, cliff rocks and vegetation placement.

Andreas Kling ports the game Diablo to SerenityOS, his from-scratch Unix-like operating system, using the devilutionX project. The roughly 80-minute session shows what porting third-party software to the OS involves.

A CppCon 2018 talk arguing that OOP has failed to deliver on reuse and performance, and presenting data-oriented design for C++ with practical worked examples from real systems.

A two-hour extended interview in which Crash Bandicoot co-creator Andy Gavin tells how he and Jason Rubin built the game at Naughty Dog. It includes the custom Lisp tools used.

David Crane's 2011 GDC postmortem of Pitfall, the classic Atari 2600 game. He explains how he created the game under the severe hardware limits of the console.

Pat Wyatt, a veteran game programmer who worked at Blizzard and ArenaNet, speaks at HandmadeCon 2015 in a conversation with Casey Muratori. He discusses network code and architecture in games he worked on, including mistakes on Diablo and the success of Guild Wars.

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.

IGN plays through the first episode of the original Doom with its creator John Romero providing commentary. Romero shares stories, design secrets and behind-the-scenes details about the levels, including E1M1.

Lex Fridman talks with Tufts biologist Michael Levin about bioelectricity, embryogenesis, xenobots and how cells collectively pursue goals. They range into cognition, evolution and the possibility of aliens.