project starline

Google's short promo for Project Starline, a booth that shows a life-size, three-dimensional view of the person you are talking to. It presents the technology as a magic window for friends, families and co-workers who are far apart.

Zack Freedman gives advice on why makers fail to finish projects, including scrapping bad ideas, showing work publicly and writing a plan that keeps projects fun. It is aimed at hardware DIY but generalizes.

A four-minute programmer rap by stdout about abandoned side projects and the promise to finish them someday. The lyrics poke fun at dev procrastination and big app ideas.

Brandon Thomas demos Laser Pong, a game he built on a laser projector and projected onto buildings around Atlanta. It was a weekend project.

Eric Brechner, a Microsoft Xbox development manager, presents his Kanban approach for agile project management at Talks at Google. He covers using sticky notes to organize work, estimate and meet deadlines.

A short clip from The West Wing in which characters argue for the Gall-Peters map projection over Mercator. It dramatizes how standard maps distort the relative size of countries.

A Vox explainer on why California's high-speed rail project is years late and far over budget, with only a few concrete structures built by 2022. It covers the political, legal and routing challenges behind the delays.

Google ATAP's short 2014 introduction to Project Tango, a mobile device effort to give phones and tablets a human-scale understanding of space and motion. It pitches ideas like indoor navigation and games that interact with your physical space.

The secret project cutscene for The Planetary Datalinks from Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, featuring a quote about free information flow as the safeguard against tyranny.

Google ATAP's 2015 introduction to Project Soli, a radar-based sensor on a chip that tracks sub-millimeter hand motions for gesture interaction in small devices.

Declassified footage of 1950s tests of Project Orion, the nuclear pulse propulsion concept, including the Hot Rod prototypes flown on conventional high explosives. It shows the pusher-plate idea working in small scale.

Darius Kazemi's XOXO 2014 talk on releasing 72 weird internet side projects in a year. Framed as 'How I Won the Lottery,' it argues that success needs both luck and buying many tickets.

The first installment of a hobbyist's video diary documenting his build of a giant walking spider-like vehicle. The footage is casual and self-shot, following the early stages of the project.

A 78-minute Richard Feynman lecture of anecdotes about working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, followed by about ten minutes of audience Q&A in which he tells three safe-cracking stories.

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.

Mikey Dickerson's keynote at Velocity NY 2014, one year after the healthcare.gov launch failure. He recounts how a small team rescued the site and what the episode showed about government IT contracting.

Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk gives a Monki Gras talk arguing that abusive, toxic contributors damage open source projects. He makes the case for removing them from communities.

Roman Elizarov compares Kotlin Coroutines with OpenJDK Project Loom virtual threads, looking at their design goals and how those translate into different implementations and tradeoffs. He addresses how the two can coexist.

Chris Urmson's SXSW 2016 talk on Google's self-driving car project, covering 1.3 million self-driven miles and the gap between hype and reality. It shows sensor visualizations and playbacks of hard situations the cars met, and discusses failures such as the low-speed bus collision.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk by the creator of Org-mode, introducing the Emacs subsystem for plain-text note-taking and project planning. It covers outlines, TODO states, tags, dates and priorities, and later shows using Org-mode as a spreadsheet.

Tony Schwartz of The Energy Project speaks at Google about managing energy rather than time. He draws on The Power of Full Engagement and his work on stamina and sustained performance.

A short clip from The West Wing in which staffers meet a group advocating the Peters projection and challenge the Mercator map. It was shown as geography humor at a Salt Lake GIS user group meeting.

Pieter Levels talks at Dojo Bali about building startups without venture capital through bootstrapping, persistence and learning many skills as a generalist. He reviews his own past projects.

Nick Caston compares Unity's sample ECS/DOTS project (AngryBots) with his own from-scratch C++ and OpenGL clone. He benchmarks performance and discusses the effort involved in each approach.

Naomi Wu documents her project helping Martha Lillard, one of the last polio survivors living in an iron lung, by fabricating replacement neck collars in Shenzhen. She reports the collars worked.

Daniel Stenberg's keynote at FrOSCon 2025 on AI slop attacks on the curl project, with examples of bogus AI-generated security reports. He discusses the toll on maintainers and why various countermeasures don't fit the project.

BigClive explains why microwave oven transformer projects are extremely dangerous, since the high voltage and high current can kill. He contrasts them with spot welder builds where the secondary is replaced by low-voltage heavy wire.

Pranav Mistry demos SixthSense, a wearable device that projects information onto the physical world and lets people interact with data through gestures. He also shows a paper "laptop" and says he will open-source the software.

Kees Cook of Google gives a Linux Foundation talk on the Kernel Self Protection Project, which aims to harden Linux against attackers. He surveys threats, the state of available defensive technologies and a year of community progress.

A short satirical Onion News Network segment presenting Facebook as a CIA project. It plays on surveillance and data-collection fears.

Google's early concept video for Project Glass, showing a wearer navigating a city with augmented-reality glasses that surface contextual information. It was made when the project was just starting.

A real-time demoscene production made with an overhead projector, released by DESiRE and TRSi for @Party in the OHP category. It is a short, quirky entry in the demoscene tradition.

A short project video in which Greg Raiz turns a 32-inch eInk display into a wireless digital newspaper showing daily front pages. It runs for months on battery, and the code is published on GitHub.

Markus Kayser's Solar Sinter project video shows a machine in the desert using sunlight and sand to 3D print glass objects. It is a short demonstration of desert manufacturing from renewable energy and local material.

A clip from the sitcom Better Off Ted in which a team gives a presentation about the Jabberwocky Project without having anything to present.

Code Rush is a one-hour documentary following Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley through the company's last year as an independent firm. It covers the Mozilla open-source announcement, the frantic push to ready the source for release by March 31, 1998, and the toll on engineers' lives before the AOL acquisition.

3Blue1Brown builds visual intuition for quaternions, showing how to think about this four-dimensional number system using stereographic projection and rotations in 3D space. It is part one of a two-part series with an interactive companion site.

Huygens Optics explains the Fourier transform and shows how a lens performs one optically. A DLP projector is used as a Fourier filter to do simple pattern recognition on lithographic character patterns.

Code Rush is a 2000 PBS documentary following Netscape engineers during the year they open-sourced the browser as Mozilla. It shows the pressure and long hours of work in Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com era.

Ian Hubert's Blender Conference talk on world building in Blender, covering photogrammetry, camera projection and assembling complex environments from simple shapes at great speed.