script blocking

Douglas Crockford's 2009 Google tech talk on the good and bad parts of JavaScript, based on his book. He argues for using a reliable subset of the language and avoiding its flawed features.

A 2009 Google Tech Talk by Nicholas Zakas on the hidden performance pitfalls of JavaScript. It covers what is fast and slow in the language and how to avoid common bottlenecks.

Paul Biggar's Google Tech Talk on compiling and optimizing scripting languages, drawn from his work on the phc ahead-of-time PHP compiler. He covers runtime typing, aliasing and code generation challenges, and argues AOT can compete with JIT.

A 2007 video of someone trying to write Perl scripts using Windows Vista speech recognition, with comically bad results. The footage shows the recognizer repeatedly mangling commands.

Steve Yegge is interviewed at Google's Kirkland office about the birth, growth and future of his Rhino on Rails project, a Rails clone on the Rhino JavaScript engine, and other web development topics.

A 2007 video of someone trying to write Perl code using Windows Vista's speech recognition, with hilariously bad results.

A clip from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman explains heat as the jiggling of atoms and how we perceive it as hot and cold.

Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and founder of FriendFeed, speaks at Startup School 08 about listening to users. He covers feedback, features, aiming for 100 happy users, and treating "that's impossible" as a statement of limited experience.