javascript

A roughly three-hour Lex Fridman podcast conversation with Brendan Eich, creator of JavaScript and co-founder of Mozilla and Brave. It covers JavaScript's rushed creation at Netscape, the browser wars, Firefox and Mozilla, and Brave's privacy approach.

Andreas Kling live-codes a prototype JavaScript JIT compiler for the LibJS engine used in SerenityOS and Ladybird. He builds a standalone bytecode VM, a simple interpreter, and then a simple JIT in about 80 minutes.

A comedy sketch by Kai Lentit in which a senior JavaScript developer is interviewed, parodying the chaos of the JavaScript ecosystem.

Omar Rizwan's short !!Con talk about writing a Breakout game in JavaScript that runs inside a PDF. It explores the surprisingly large PDF specification, including its scripting support.

A Rubber Duck Engineering episode on the years before Flutter, covering web projects and three JavaScript frameworks that influenced it, and the early DOM-based, network-loaded Flutter.

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.

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.

Richard Feldman's GOTO Copenhagen 2022 talk on why dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, PHP and JavaScript rose in the 1990s and why each now has a popular static type checker. It argues that modern static typing recovers the advantages that made dynamic languages attractive.

Andrej Karpathy's first Neural Networks: Zero to Hero lecture, which builds micrograd, a tiny autograd engine, from scratch in Python. It explains backpropagation and neural network training step by step, assuming only basic Python and some high-school calculus.

Miguel de Icaza's GodotCon 2023 talk on Swift bindings for Godot. He argues that garbage-collector pauses in C# are a persistent problem and that Swift's reference counting avoids them.

David Beazley's PyData Global 2021 keynote, an oral history of early scientific Python. He tells how Python ended up running on a Connection Machine supercomputer at Los Alamos.

Robert Erdmann, a materials scientist at the Rijksmuseum, gives a PyCon keynote on the ultra-high-resolution imaging of Rembrandt's Night Watch. He covers the automated gantry camera system, the Python software that drives it, and the large volumes of image data involved.

Lex Fridman interviews Travis Oliphant, creator of NumPy, SciPy and Anaconda, about scientific Python and its history. It runs about three hours.

Luke Wagner of Fastly explains what a WebAssembly component is, how it relates to familiar concepts, and what the Component Model enables. It emphasizes security, composability and modularity.

In a long live-coding session, Andreas Kling works on making the Cookie Clicker game playable in the Ladybird browser from SerenityOS. He tracks down bugs in the browser engine and fixes them.

Rik Arends presents Makepad, a Rust UI framework, at RustNL 2023. The talk covers designing modern, GPU-fast UIs with Rust and includes live-coded demos of an IDE and a synthesizer.

A roughly three-hour Lex Fridman podcast conversation with Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python. Topics include Python's design, the GIL, asyncio, the future of programming and AI coding tools.

A Linear engineer talks about scaling the company's sync engine, which keeps client data local and synchronized. It follows an earlier talk on the same system.

Felienne Hermans presents Hedy, a gradual programming language for teaching kids that moves through levels from almost no syntax toward full Python. The talk covers why error messages and syntax are scary for beginners.

A JuliaCon talk by a NASA Launch Services Program engineer on modeling spacecraft separation dynamics in Julia. He describes replacing a Simulink-based workflow for checking launch vehicle separation requirements with Julia and ModelingToolkit, with large speedups and much shorter code.

The Michigan TypeScript group shows the Doom engine running entirely inside the TypeScript type system. It is open source, and two follow-up videos cover why and how they did it.

Tom Scott's video whose title shows its own live view count, and the story of how he made that work. It explains why open APIs were once common and why they largely disappeared.

A two-minute clip of Steve Jobs at WWDC 2007 introducing the plan for iPhone third-party apps as web apps built on Safari and Ajax. It shows the original vision before the native SDK and App Store.

Answer in Progress investigates why Japanese websites look different from those elsewhere, using an AI clustering approach to test the 2013 claim. It then looks at possible explanations.