problem solving

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2019 talk on the mental strategies he uses when programming in Python, such as chunking, solving a simpler related problem, and repeating tasks manually until patterns emerge. This version is re-synced with the slides.

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.

An episode of the Well There's Your Problem podcast on the 1987 Goiania radiological accident in Brazil, based largely on the IAEA report. It goes through the event day by day.

An episode of the Well There's Your Problem podcast on five-over-one buildings, wood-frame floors atop concrete bases, with engineering background and some oil industry news. It is long, rambling and has NSFW language.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2019 talk on the mental habits behind effective programming, drawn from coaching, teaching and StackOverflow. He covers problem decomposition, chunking, managing working memory and getting unstuck.

Timothy Gowers thinks aloud, in real time, as he tries to understand why Pascal's determinant equals 1. He does not fully solve it in this episode, but shows his exploratory process.

The first lecture of Caltech's CS 156 Machine Learning course by Yaser Abu-Mostafa, introducing the learning problem and supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning. It is one of 18 lectures in the Learning from Data course.

Guy Steele presents a small geometric problem and compares four computational approaches: a classic sequential solution and three parallel-friendly ones. Each is illustrated pictorially and with working code, weighing total work against time to solution.

Rich Hickey's Clojure Conj 2023 talk on design in practice, covering problem statements, decision matrices, choosing precise words and making decisions in a team.

Casey Muratori's long talk arguing that modern software has ballooned to tens of millions of lines because of hardware and OS diversity. He proposes a stable ISA for entire system-on-a-chip packages and recalls when games shipped with their own boot disk.

Dan Olson's roughly two-hour video essay critiques NFTs, cryptocurrency, and Web3, covering their technical, economic, and ideological flaws. It is heavily sourced and ends with the advice to ask whether a project needs crypto to work.

Bryan Cantrill's 2007 Google Tech Talk on DTrace, showing how dynamic tracing improves debugging of both development and live production systems. It includes a vivid war story about tracking down a problem on a Sun Ray server.

A 36C3 talk by Bunnie Huang arguing that open source is necessary but not sufficient for trustworthy hardware, because verifying hardware is destructive and so creates a time-of-check/time-of-use gap. It surveys supply chain security and classes of hardware attacks, and presents the Betrusted approach to narrowing that gap.

Donald Knuth's 2017 Christmas Tree Lecture at Stanford about a combinatorial geometry problem whose computed numbers matched a striking formula. He tells the story of the conjecture and its sequel.

Physicist Jacob Barandes discusses his view that quantum mechanics can be formulated without wave functions, using a stochastic, probabilistic approach. The long interview covers measurement, the foundations of quantum theory and the history of the field.

Noam Chomsky's 2011 University of Oslo lecture on Newton's contributions to the study of mind. He argues Newton abandoned mechanical explanation and lowered the bar for scientific intelligibility, with consequences for the limits of human understanding. Q&A starts at 45:33.

Dennis Gustafsson, creator of Teardown, presents how he parallelized the physics solver for an upcoming game, followed by a Q&A. The talk was given at the Better Software Conference 2025.

Jonathan Blow gives a roughly 90-minute talk, followed by Q&A, on how video games could actually improve education, in contrast to what is currently being tried.

An 88-minute Microsoft Research talk that explains how quantum computers beat classical ones using basic linear algebra, qubits, superposition and gates. It works through the Deutsch oracle problem and ends with entanglement, teleportation and a live demo.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) traces the history of software from 1948 to today, looking at the problems programmers faced, how they were solved, and what mistakes the profession made. He then projects where the field is going, including professionalism and regulation.

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.

Rich Hickey's keynote on software versioning, arguing that breaking changes are the real problem and that libraries should only grow by providing more and requiring less. It critiques semantic versioning and ties into Clojure spec.

A one-hour 2019 KOMO News documentary hosted by Eric Johnson on Seattle's homelessness and drug crisis, with interviews and looks at proposed solutions including a drug court program in Rhode Island. It argues addiction and mental illness are at the core of the problem.

A lecture by Richard Feynman on how computers work, using the analogy of a filing clerk that becomes progressively dumber and faster. It also covers heuristics and how computers handle data and solve problems in finite time.

Okta developer advocate Nate Barbettini explains OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect in a roughly hour-long talk. It starts from the problems the protocols solve and walks through the flows. The description notes the implicit flow material is now out of date.

Dropbox engineer Kevin Modzelewski gives a Stanford colloquium on Dropbox's history and the technical problems it faced scaling, including detailed database schema decisions.

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.

A KQED Truly CA documentary narrated by John Waters about the Salton Sea, a once-glamorous California vacation spot now home to an eccentric community. It covers the area's economic, political and environmental problems and features Salvation Mountain.

Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure and designer of Datomic, gives a JaxConf 2012 talk that takes apart traditional database architecture. He presents a different way to think about databases and explains the reasoning behind Datomic's fact-based design.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2016 talk on lifetime safety in C++, aiming for code free of leaks and dangling pointers by default. It covers smart pointers, ownership, reference counting pitfalls and deferred reclamation resembling garbage collection.

Scott Wlaschin demystifies functional programming terms like monads, monoids, functors and catamorphisms by showing how they fit into a small toolkit. He applies them to problems such as missing data, list handling, and functional dependency injection.

The first three talks from React Conf 2018, by Sophie Alpert, Dan Abramov and Ryan Florence. They introduce React Hooks and explain the problems with classes that hooks solve.

Guy Steele's PPoPP 2017 keynote surveying the history of computer science metanotation, including BNF, inference rules, and overline notation. He argues the field's notations are inconsistent and fragmented.

A Royal Institution event with Sean Carroll and Jennifer Ouellette on what happens if you fall into a black hole, covering the firewall paradox, the information problem and the holographic principle.

Stephan T. Lavavej's CppCon 2019 talk on implementing floating-point to_chars and from_chars in Microsoft's C++ STL. It covers the history of float-string conversion and the algorithms that make it much faster.

Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker gives the 2018 Donald B. Gillies Memorial Lecture at Illinois. He discusses the gap between academic research and industry problems, publishing incentives, and the influence of large industry users on research.

Elasticsearch engineer and Lucene committer Adrien Grand explains the design decisions inside a Lucene index and what problems it can and cannot solve. The talk goes into how Lucene stores data for fast search and analytics.

Chai Jing's 104-minute documentary on China's smog, with full English subtitles. A former TV anchor, she investigates what smog is, where it comes from and what can be done, prompted by her daughter's health problems.

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk argues for rethinking networking around named data rather than host-to-host connections. He gives the history and the unsolved problems of the current internet architecture.

Chandler Carruth walks through tuning C++ performance, from writing benchmarks to analyzing results on real CPUs and compilers. It focuses on small-scale problems such as loop kernels, data structures and algorithms, and on keeping compilers from optimizing benchmarks away.