software quality

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.

A DevGAMM talk by Jonathan Blow arguing that civilizations can lose technological capability and that software quality is already deteriorating. He discusses how knowledge fails to transfer between generations.

Bryan Cantrill's Craft 2019 talk on the ethical dilemmas software engineers face as software eats the world. He explores cases where engineering thinking conflicts with the law or personal morals, including Facebook's news feed experiments.

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.

Glenn Vanderburg asks whether software development can be real engineering, surveying other engineering disciplines and decades of programming experience. He envisions what a software engineering worthy of the name might look like.

Simon Brown's Agile on the Beach 2019 talk presents the C4 model, a lightweight approach to diagramming software architecture with a shared vocabulary and simple notation.

Glenn Vanderburg argues at the O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference that software development is an engineering discipline, even if immature. He contends the discredited body of knowledge called software engineering has led people to wrongly reject the label.

An Economics Explained video arguing that the Netherlands shows taxes alone can't reduce wealth inequality. It distinguishes income inequality from wealth inequality and discusses the Gini index.

Asianometry examines why Japan's software industry has lagged despite its hardware strengths. It looks at dependence on US software and the low prestige of programming.

Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Conservancy speaks at the 2009 Law of the Commons Conference about free and open software as a model for a new intellectual commons. The talk covers the legal and social case for sharing knowledge.

Richard Wilkinson presents data showing that societies with larger income gaps do worse on health, lifespan, trust and other measures. He argues the effects track inequality itself rather than average income. It is a 17-minute TED talk.

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 short clip of Richard Stallman singing the free software song, recorded during a visit to Ecuador.

A one-minute clip from the All Things D conference in which Steve Jobs says Apple is fundamentally a software company, with iPod, Mac and iPhone all being software. He says the hardware is where the money is but the value is in the software.

Jonathan Blow's DevGAMM 2019 talk argues that software knowledge is being lost between generations and that growing layers of abstraction could lead to a decline in technological civilization.

A short infographic video on the distribution of wealth in America, contrasting what people believe, what they consider ideal, and the actual numbers. It highlights how top-heavy US wealth is.

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2016 talk on how software engineers pass knowledge down through oral tradition, from folk rhymes to programmer lore and stories like why C lacks a logical XOR. He argues for writing software with future generations in mind.

Glenn Vanderburg argues at Lone Star Ruby Conference 2010 that university-style software engineering does not work, and asks what real software engineering would look like. He revisits the waterfall model and what engineering means in other fields.

A HandmadeCon 2016 panel where Chris Hecker, John Miles, Sean Barrett and Chris Green give an oral history of software texture mapping in 90s games.

Andrej Karpathy's keynote at AI Startup School laying out software 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0, with LLMs seen as utilities, fabs and operating systems. It covers LLM quirks, partial-autonomy apps and keeping a human in the generate-and-verify loop.

Nick Hanauer's short TED University talk on economic inequality, which was famously not posted on TED's main site at first. He argues that rich people are not the job creators.

Thomas Sowell speaks at the Hoover Institution about economic and racial inequality and what he considers myths about poverty. He also recounts his early life and brief flirtation with Marxism.

Tantacrul dissects the UX and UI of Avid's Sibelius music notation software, going through a long list of bad design choices. The review is both a comic rant and a practical lesson in interface design.

David Heinemeier Hansson explains what he learned about indoor air quality after his new house made his family sick. He covers CO2, VOCs, off-gassing, HVAC and ventilation, and cognitive effects, presented at a Basecamp meetup.

Greg Wilson surveys what empirical research actually shows about software development, why we believe it, and how to share that knowledge more widely. It covers evidence on practices such as TDD and design patterns.

Sean Parent of Adobe argues that object-oriented frameworks ultimately fail to deliver scalable, high quality software and proposes combining generic and declarative programming instead. It draws on Stepanov's Elements of Programming.

A short clip of the Super Mario Bros 3 proof-of-concept PC port built by id Software's founders to pitch Nintendo on a PC version. Nintendo passed, and the same technology led to Commander Keen.

A three-minute Positive Money UK explainer arguing that the commercial banking system, where banks create most money as debt, redistributes income from the bottom 90 percent to the top 10 percent through interest.

JPL's David Cummings presents at the 2025 Flight Software Workshop how the team diagnosed and fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 anomaly from billions of miles away. It walks through the flight computer and the memory fix.

Rich Hickey's Strange Loop 2011 keynote distinguishing 'simple' (not intertwined) from 'easy' (familiar or near at hand). It argues that software complexity comes from complecting things and that we should pick simple constructs.

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.

John Ousterhout, Stanford professor and creator of Tcl, presents the ideas of his book A Philosophy of Software Design in a Talks at Google session. He covers managing complexity, deep modules and interfaces, and what he teaches in his Stanford software design course.

Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software gives a GDC 2018 retrospective on surviving as an indie game maker since 1994, from shareware days through Steam. It covers business realities, costs and sustaining a comfortable living without chasing riches.

An episode of the Norwegian documentary series Brainwash, in which a comedian interviews academics from different sides about gender differences and gender equality. It looks at why more equal societies can still show unequal career choices.

An Al Jazeera investigation into Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, featuring current and former engineers who voice safety concerns. It covers quality control problems at the South Carolina plant and the roots of the battery problems that grounded the plane.

Kevlin Henney's GOTO 2018 talk argues that much of what looks new in software is a recycling of concepts with long histories. It draws on history to show the slow, steady current beneath constant churn in frameworks and trends.

David Heinemeier Hansson's RailsConf 2014 keynote argues that programming is closer to writing than to science, with clear code produced by iterating through drafts. It prioritizes clarity and craft over technical superiority.

Tom Scott explains why confetti and snow wreck video quality, using interframe compression and bitrate. He demonstrates it live by changing the quality on screen.

Karen Sandler's keynote at Linux.conf.au 2012 on the software running inside medical devices such as her own pacemaker-defibrillator. She discusses the difficulty of learning what code runs in life-sustaining devices and why open source matters there.

Bryan Cantrill's Scale By The Bay 2019 talk on software after Moore's Law. He covers the end of easy scaling and the move toward specialized, emerging architectures.