software process

Richard Stallman's TEDxGeneva 2014 talk describing how nonfree programs give companies control over users and what users can do to regain control. It introduces the free software movement and the four freedoms.

A ten-minute clip from Jonathan Blow's talk on preventing the collapse of civilization, arguing that software quality and the knowledge to build it are in decline.

Andrej Karpathy's Databricks talk on Software 2.0, the shift from human-written code to code produced by neural network training. It covers how developer work moves toward curating datasets, the advantages and challenges, and opportunities for new tooling.

A clip in which Eben Moglen tells how he grew up when software was freer and how his path crossed Richard Stallman's. He describes how they came to work together to make software free again.

Karen Sandler, then Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, talks at OSCON 2011 about the risks of proprietary, closed-source software in implanted medical devices like her own pacemaker-defibrillator.

A short conference talk from !!Con 2017 in which Kevin Chen explains the HDR imaging algorithm from a foundational paper, framing it as a system of linear equations, and implements it in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. No prior image processing knowledge is needed.

Gary Bernhardt argues that software history moves in reactions to earlier tools, and that new tools are not simply better in every way. He distinguishes capability (what a tool allows) from suitability (what it fits), and warns against repeating past mistaken reactions.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth argues in this TED talk that perception is a controlled hallucination: the brain constantly predicts the world and our shared agreement is what we call reality. He also touches on the construction of the self.

An AWS re:Invent session explaining Amazon's Working Backwards process, where teams start from customer needs and write a press release and FAQ (PR-FAQ) before building. It covers the five customer questions that frame the process.

Audio-only recording of the first part of John Carmack's QuakeCon 2010 keynote, taken from G4TV. It covers id Software's work around that time, including Rage and platform topics such as PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, and includes his informal audience poll about paying for mobile apps.

Louis CK speaks at a 2010 NYPL tribute to George Carlin about how Carlin's habit of discarding material and writing a new hour each year changed his own career. He becomes emotional describing it.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, reflects on the pressure placed on artists to be geniuses. She proposes the older idea that creative people have a genius that visits them rather than being one.

Eben Moglen's 2011 Personal Democracy Forum talk on the loss of anonymity and privacy on the internet. He proposes building an alternative net of personal servers, the idea behind FreedomBox.

Drew Berry shows scientifically accurate animations of molecular processes inside cells, such as DNA replication, at TEDxSydney.

Excerpts from Linus Torvalds's DebConf 14 talk on why desktop Linux struggles. He covers application distribution, distros breaking backwards compatibility, wasted package management effort and how Windows does app distribution better.

John Rauser's Strata 2014 keynote argues that programmers can learn statistics quickly by simulating random processes and shuffling data. He explains p-values through resampling rather than formulas.

A short talk by Will Dayble of Squareweave arguing that you should design software as if the user were drunk: distracted, impaired in attention and vision, and prone to misreading. It is a user experience talk built around that framing.

Brandon Sanderson's keynote on AI-generated art, arguing that the artistic process and the journey matter more than the finished product. He explains why he rebels against generative AI in creative work.

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.