post-mortem

Timothy Cain's 2012 GDC postmortem of the original Fallout, covering how he helped build the game and set the template for open-world RPGs. He talks through production, design and programming decisions.

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.

A 2017 GDC postmortem in which Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley tell how Civilization came together from board game design and sim game experience. They cover its development history and design decisions, including fairness and luck.

A 2018 GDC panel where Raph Koster, Starr Long, Richard Garriott and Rich Vogel look back on what went right and wrong building and running Ultima Online. They share candid stories from the early days, including player behavior and server architecture.

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.

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.

Frederick Raynal gives a GDC postmortem of Alone in the Dark, the game that helped create the survival horror genre. He covers how the team built it and shows some of the old 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.

Bryan Cantrill's GOTO Chicago 2017 talk on debugging production systems under pressure, centered on the incident where an operator's mistyped command rebooted an entire Joyent datacenter. It covers human factors, automation and architecture.

Adam Robinson-Yu's GDC 2020 talk on how he shelved a big project to prototype what became A Short Hike. He covers the solo development process and technical choices like a pixel shader over low-poly models.

Kevin Fang comically retells GitLab's 2017 incident in which an engineer deleted the production database, based on the company's postmortems. It walks through the confusion and failed backups.

David Crane, designer of Pitfall for the Atari 2600, gives a GDC 2011 postmortem on the game's design challenges. He covers how he fit a large world into the console's tiny memory. The session ends with Q&A.

CGP Grey explains that postal codes are routing instructions for mail rather than geographic regions. He looks at the quirks and problems this causes.

A three-hour PyCon 2016 tutorial by Christophe Pettus that orients Python developers to PostgreSQL. It covers installation, administration, and use, including vacuuming, MVCC, replication and backups.

Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange survey recent highlights in post-quantum cryptography at 35C3, covering the NIST competition, network protocol experiments, and broken candidates.

Esther Gokhale's short TEDx talk argues that the natural human spine is curved rather than straight and teaches a 'primal posture' for sitting without back pain.

Washington Post video of the experiment in which violinist Joshua Bell played incognito at a D.C. metro station. It asks whether commuters would notice a world-class musician in an ordinary setting.

Nickolas Means recounts the 1979 Three Mile Island accident minute by minute, from the control rod insertion to the operator's decision to switch off emergency cooling. He argues that finding systemic causes is more useful than blaming individuals.

A dotScale 2014 talk by Robert Kennedy, a former healthcare.gov SRE who later worked at Google, about the engineering effort to rescue the troubled site. It explains the technical and organizational problems behind the failed launch.

Dan Robinson, then CTO of Heap, explains how Heap runs its product analytics backend on PostgreSQL and CitusDB. It covers conversion funnels, retention and cohort queries across tens of billions of events and 50 TB of data, plus Postgres and Kafka together and the indexing strategy.

Neil Postman's 1997 lecture at College of DuPage, based on his book, argues that Americans treat technology as a national religion and depend on it to solve larger human problems. It includes audience questions.

CGP Grey explains how the 2015 UK general election showed the flaws of first-past-the-post voting, with parties like UKIP winning many votes but few seats.

Jimmy Bogard presents a post-mortem of a real microservices migration that turned into a slow distributed monolith. He covers the modeling, development and production problems and how the team recovered.

D. Richard Hipp's PGCon 2014 keynote on SQLite's relationship to PostgreSQL. He explains that SQLite was originally written from PostgreSQL 6.5 documentation and that the two engines serve different classes of problems.

A short Star Trek: The Next Generation clip about how money no longer exists in the 24th century. It shows the crew explaining a post-scarcity economy to people from the 20th century.

A short clip of Steve Jobs at the D8 conference discussing the post-PC era, including his analogy of PCs as trucks that will remain for a minority of users.

Phil Vischer of VeggieTales and Holy Post gives an 18-minute history of racial injustice in America, covering why anger persists despite civil rights laws. It is told from an evangelical Christian perspective and adapted from a class he co-taught.

Kelly Starrett's Talks at Google presentation on staying healthy while desk bound, mixing anatomy and practical mobility advice. It shows how to set up a desk and sit and move to avoid pain.

Tom Scott visits the USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, where keyers decipher mail images machines cannot read. It shows the lengths taken to decode bad handwriting.

A Last Week Tonight segment on the US Postal Service's financial troubles. John Oliver explains why it matters, what pushed it to this point, and what viewers can do.

A short edited clip from Star Trek: First Contact in which Captain Picard explains that humanity of the future no longer works for money or possessions. Added context frames the second part of the clip.

A short Newsweek clip of White House press secretary Jen Psaki saying the administration is flagging problematic posts to Facebook that spread COVID-19 and vaccine disinformation.

The six Norton Lectures Jorge Luis Borges gave in 1967-68, titled This Craft of Verse, on topics including the riddle of poetry, metaphor, storytelling, translation and a poet's creed. The recording runs over four hours.

Channel 4 News's full interview with Jordan Peterson, in which Cathy Newman presses him on the gender pay gap, patriarchy, campus protests and postmodernism. It was widely discussed for its confrontational style.

An Onion Talks satire in which a young media professional pitches compost-powered cars, offering the idea itself and leaving all implementation to others.

Comedian Rob Paravonian's 'Pachelbel Rant', a comedy bit showing that the chord progression of Pachelbel's Canon underlies countless pop songs. This is a high-quality 2019 re-post of the 2006 original.

Tom Scott and Matt Gray talk at Electromagnetic Field about making Emojli, an emoji-only messenger that began as a joke, how it was built and why they never want to do it again.

Amy Cuddy's TED talk arguing that adopting expansive postures, or power posing, can boost feelings of confidence and affect success. A note on the video points to the later reproducibility debate over its findings.

Tom Scott recounts the worst typo he ever made, a subtle mistake in code with destructive consequences at a previous job. It is a cautionary tale about irreversible operations.

A short South Park clip from the 'Post COVID: The Return of COVID' special in which Stan relies on his Alexa. It plays on voice assistants responding to their wake word.