node.js

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, 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.

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.

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.

A short satirical sketch in which a Q&A about web servers turns into a profane rant about threads, blocking and non-blocking I/O. It lampoons the hype around Node.js and async programming.

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.

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.

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.

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

Daniel Lemire's QCon talk on how simdjson parses gigabytes of JSON per second. It covers SIMD vectorization, branch prediction and the lessons learned building a fast parser.

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.

Steven Wittens' JSConf US 2013 talk on drawing with WebGL, using animated visuals to walk through vectors, matrices and the rendering pipeline. Despite the title, it works as a visual primer on the linear algebra behind 3D graphics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tsoding live-codes a JSON parser from scratch in Haskell in about 111 lines, using only the standard library. It is an edited Twitch stream that explains the intuition behind parser combinators, functors, applicatives and monads.

A three-minute clip in which Douglas Crockford explains why he allowed the JSLint reference implementation to be used for evil. It recounts the license clause and how corporate lawyers reacted.

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.

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.

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

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.

Smalltalk pioneer Dan Ingalls presents the Lively Kernel at JSConf US 2012, a live, direct-manipulation programming environment running in the browser. He shows drag-and-drop building of live objects on the web.

A SIGGRAPH 2019 course on geometric algebra. Charles Gunn gives an intro, then Steven De Keninck gives a programmer-focused course with live examples in ganja.js.

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.

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.

Douglas Crockford's first Yahoo lecture puts JavaScript in historical context. He traces the language's structure and quirks back through the early decades of computer science and programming language history.

Bruce Hauman live-codes Flappy Bird in ClojureScript in about six minutes, using figwheel to hot-reload changes into the running game. The demo shows game behavior being changed interactively without restarting.

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.

Evan Czaplicki's Strange Loop 2014 talk surveys the many formulations of functional reactive programming and how they relate historically and theoretically. It then shows how Elm's variant enables hot-swapping and its time-traveling debugger.

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.

Facebook engineers explain why they abandoned the traditional MVC paradigm for a more functional architecture, introducing Flux and React. They use the unread-message-count bug as a case study of the problems of bidirectional data flow at scale.

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 Mickens's 2015 Harvard colloquium argues that browsers are bloated and insecure because feature races trump clean interface design. He presents a cleaner, more secure browser architecture (Atlantis) with a much smaller API surface.

A Channel 9 conversation recorded at GOTO 2012 between Anders Hejlsberg (TypeScript) and Lars Bak (Dart). They discuss the two languages and different approaches to making JavaScript development safer, including runtime type checking.

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.

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.

Yaron Minsky of Jane Street shows how the OCaml Incremental library lets trading UIs express data transformations that are easy to read and efficient on streaming data. It includes a live table demo.

David Heinemeier Hansson's opening keynote at RailsConf 2019 argues against the expectation of payment for open source work, drawing on his experience releasing Rails. It also includes lighter asides about the industry.

An episode of FunFunFunction explaining monads in JavaScript as functors that also implement flatMap. It builds on the preceding functor episode and works through code examples.