javascript

James Mickens delivers his comedic rant about JavaScript and web programming, in his usual dry, hyperbolic style. It includes his account of learning the language from the O'Reilly Definitive Guide.

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.

Douglas Crockford's Nordic.js 2014 talk on 'the better parts' of JavaScript and programming in general. He argues against `this`, `new` and ES6 classes, and for classless, composition-based object patterns, with some broader remarks on building better structures for the future.

Douglas Crockford's Google Tech Talk explains monads without category theory or Haskell, implementing them in JavaScript and tying them to Ajax and promises. He also touches on odd asides such as coloring code by scope.

Philip Roberts explains the JavaScript event loop, call stack, callbacks and asynchronous behavior with live visualizations using a tool he built. It demystifies terms like non-blocking and single-threaded.

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.

Brian Lonsdorf explains why Underscore.js falls short as a functional programming library, then introduces currying, composition and point-free style in JavaScript. He argues for data-last argument ordering.

Ryan Dahl's JSConf EU talk introducing Node.js to the world. He explains the motivation for event-driven, non-blocking I/O, with JavaScript chosen mainly for its asynchronous nature.

Jake Archibald's JSConf.Asia 2018 talk "In the Loop" explains the browser event loop, covering tasks, microtasks, requestAnimationFrame, and how rendering interleaves with JavaScript. It uses visual walkthroughs to show why code runs in surprising orders and why setTimeout fixes are unreliable.

Cheng Lou's react-europe 2016 talk lays out a mental framework for thinking about abstraction levels in JavaScript tooling, from Angular and Grunt to Webpack and React. It uses that framework to reason about the cost of abstractions and how to choose between competing solutions.

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.

Ryan Dahl's first presentation of Node.js at JSConf 2009. He pitches event-driven, non-blocking I/O as the motivation, rather than JavaScript itself.

Photopea founder Ivan Kutskir talks about developing a free browser-based photo editor, one of the most complex JavaScript programs ever written, and the web technologies behind it.

Douglas Crockford's YUIConf 2012 evening keynote tries to explain monads in a way programmers can actually understand, in the context of JavaScript. He aims to break the 'monad tutorial curse'.

Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js, introduces the event-driven I/O framework built on V8 with examples, and discusses the v0.4.0 release and its new APIs.

Dylan Beattie's entertaining NDC talk imagines an alternate history of the web, asking what if different decisions had been made on operating systems, browsers and standards. It blends real history with humor.

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.

Node.js creator Ryan Dahl discusses ten design mistakes he made in Node, including package.json, npm, and module resolution. The talk sets out the motivations behind his later project, Deno.

Ryan Dahl tells the history of Node.js and why he created it at a Phoenix meetup. He explains the push for non-blocking IO on a clean slate rather than extending an existing ecosystem.

Douglas Crockford tells how JSON was discovered rather than invented, and how its simplicity made it a dominant data interchange format. He also covers surrounding history such as earlier Netscape usage and the 'Good, not Evil' license story.

A dotJS 2012 conference talk by Fat (of Twitter Bootstrap fame) on what open source really means and why maintainers feel guilty about it. It covers the obligations, expectations and burnout that come with releasing popular open source software, delivered with humor.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, talks at Curry On 2015 about user-focused language design. He explains the principles behind Elm and how to make a functional, typed language as approachable as JavaScript.

Armin Ronacher's EuroPython 2017 keynote examining how the CPython interpreter's leaky abstractions affect language design and how Python could evolve, drawing on JavaScript and Rust experience.

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.

Tom Occhino and Jordan Walke present how Facebook builds JavaScript apps, in the talk where React was first publicly announced at JSConf US 2013.

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.

Jim Weirich's RubyConf 2012 talk derives the Y combinator step by step, live-coding in Ruby lambdas. It builds up an understanding of functional programming and lambda calculus from first principles.

Armin Ronacher, creator of Flask, explains how CPython's internals and C API leak into the language's semantics. Using examples like the complexity of the add operation, he shows why Python is hard to optimize or reimplement.

Sandi Metz takes an ugly section of conditional code and refactors it into a few simple objects, bridging object-oriented theory and practice. The talk includes her take on the Gilded Rose refactoring kata and the idea that duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction.

Svelte creator Rich Harris explains moving reactivity into the compiler and language rather than tracking state at runtime, with a history of spreadsheets as reactive systems and comparisons to React.

Joshua Bloch's Google Tech Talk on how to design good APIs and why it matters, with concrete principles and examples. It treats every programmer as an occasional API designer.

Robert C. Martin's Ruby Midwest 2011 keynote argues that software architecture should express the application's intent rather than its framework. He covers separating entities, interactors and boundaries so the web, database and framework are details.

Java Language Architect Brian Goetz talks at a Clojure conference about the challenges of evolving a mature language like Java while preserving compatibility with existing code and developer expectations. It also gives a look at where the platform is headed.

Tavis Rudd describes how RSI forced him to program by voice, and shows the Python and Emacs Lisp system he built with voice recognition. A live demo creates and deploys a small system without touching the keyboard.

Python core developer Raymond Hettinger explains how Python's dictionary implementation evolved into the compact, ordered dict in Python 3.6. He uses pictures and small bits of pure Python, and covers key-sharing, compaction and versioning.

Pete Hunt of Facebook and Instagram introduces React at JSConf EU 2013 and explains its design principles. He argues that separating templates from logic only separates technologies, not concerns, and makes the case for components.

Jack Diederich's PyCon 2012 talk argues that classes are overused in Python and walks through real code, refactoring away unnecessary classes, exceptions and modules. It popularized the heuristic that a class with two methods, one being __init__, should be a function.

Mirabai Knight's PyCon 2013 talk on Plover, a free cross-platform stenography engine that lets people write at up to 240 WPM on ordinary hardware, including a demo of coding by steno.

Paul Graham's keynote at PyCon 2012, in which he talks about startup ideas and what kinds of companies are likely to matter in the future. He discusses ideas such as a better email client and a search engine for hackers, and argues for looking back at the present from the future.

David Beazley's PyCon India closing keynote, in which he live-codes a stack machine and grows it into an interpreter that runs WebAssembly, then uses it to play a Rust-written game. It requires no prior WebAssembly knowledge.