side project

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.

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.

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.

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.

A BSidesLV 2013 talk from the Sixteen Colors project on archiving the ANSI and ASCII art scene. It traces the scene's evolution from BBSs to the NFO and IRC era.

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.

Gary Vaynerchuk's Web 2.0 Expo keynote on building a personal brand in social media. He urges keeping a day job while building something on the side, with passion and persistence, in a loud and profane style.

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.

Michael Levin's NeurIPS 2018 talk on bioelectric computation outside the nervous system, showing how cell electrical networks shape development and regeneration. It covers morphological information processing in living tissue.

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.

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.

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.

Chuck Moore, creator of Forth, gives his annual Fireside Chat at Forth Day 2011 at Stanford. He talks about his multi-core GreenArrays chip design and demonstrates code running on it.

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.

Former bank regulator William Black explains how fraud, including liar's loans, was committed from inside banks and drove the 2008 financial crisis.

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.

Inventor Mary Lou Jepsen demonstrates using red light and sound to see inside the body and brain, aiming at tumor detection and neural activity measurement, and potentially a cheaper wearable MRI replacement.

Omar Rizwan's short !!Con talk about writing a Breakout game in JavaScript that runs inside a PDF. It explores the surprisingly large PDF specification, including its scripting support.

Mark Ferrari, the LucasArts background artist, explains in a GDC 2016 talk how he draws 8-bit graphics. He covers color cycling and palette shifting to create complex animated scenery without frame animation.

Alan Kay's 2009 UIUC talk arguing that computing is more a pop culture than a science and that ignoring history and fundamentals leads to inferior solutions. He touches on the history of interactive environments and what the web should have been.

Martin Kleppmann argues that databases are global shared mutable state and proposes treating them as an ever-growing log of immutable facts. Derived data such as caches, indexes and views is then built by stream processors like Apache Samza. The talk draws on Kafka and LinkedIn's experience with commit logs.

A DEF CON 26 talk by investigative journalists and hackers on the fake science industry, with bogus conferences and predatory journals that give studies false credibility. It draws on a large investigation into the money behind them.

Tim Urban's TED talk on why people procrastinate, covering YouTube binges and Wikipedia rabbit holes. It ends with the life-calendar idea as a nudge to act before time runs out.

Chris McCord's ElixirConf 2018 keynote introduces Phoenix LiveView, which renders HTML on the server and updates the page over websockets. It includes a demo showing that latency is not the bottleneck one might expect.

Bret Victor's talk proposing a new kind of maker space built for seeing and understanding a project's behavior: inside it, across time and across possibilities. It argues for scientific understanding over recipes and rules of thumb.

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address, in which he tells three stories from his life about connecting the dots, love and loss, and death. He urges graduates to follow their dreams and find opportunity in setbacks.

Elm creator Evan Czaplicki's 2018 Elm Europe talk on how to define success for an open source project and language community. It argues against judging projects by GitHub activity and touches on community expectations.

A PyCon 2012 talk by Kurt Grandis on building an automated water-squirting turret that uses Python and computer vision to detect and drive off squirrels from a bird feeder.

A 1992 MIT Sloan talk and Q&A by Steve Jobs, then CEO of NeXT, covering NeXT's strategy, co-creating Apple, his ouster, and the value of direct experience. It ranges across technology, business and career advice.

Stephan T. Lavavej's GoingNative 2013 talk explaining why calling rand() and using rand() % 100 is bad in C++, and how the C++11 <random> header does the job properly.

Noam Chomsky speaks at Google Cambridge in 2017 about his political development and the control of information and media. It is a wide-ranging talk with audience discussion.

OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman explains the design principles behind ChatGPT and demos unreleased plug-ins at TED 2023. In the follow-up, TED head Chris Anderson presses him on the timeline of development and the risks of releasing such a tool.

A GopherCon 2014 session where Blake Mizerany replaced his planned talk with a panel discussion with members of the Go team. It covers Go's design choices and community questions.

Gary Bernhardt's RubyConf 2012 talk on testing in isolation without mocking everything. It goes through behavior versus data, mutation versus immutability, and how a functional core with an imperative shell yields natural isolation and parallelism.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, discusses the hard parts of running an open source project: online community conflict, why its patterns arise, and a cultural history of open source. He offers ideas for more civil, productive communication.

Designer Thomas Thwaites describes his attempt to build a toaster from scratch, from mining ore and deriving plastic from oil. It is a short TED talk on how much civilization a simple object depends on.

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.