stack machines

Joel Spolsky's 2009 Google Tech Talk on why StackOverflow was built, how it addresses the mess of searching for programming help, and the community design behind it. He also takes jabs at paywalled answer sites.

Joel Spolsky's 2012 Google tech talk on the cultural anthropology of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. He explains how the software was designed to shape community norms and curation standards.

Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, presents GreenArrays' 144-core asynchronous chip at Strange Loop 2013. He explains how idle cores draw almost no power and how tight code minimizes energy use.

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.

In this 2019 GDC talk, Alex Schwartz and Ziba Scott explain how they flooded the app stores with over 1,500 auto-generated slot machine games to find the lowest bar for success. They tour the dark side of the mobile app market.

Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software and StackExchange, speaks at Y Combinator's Startup School in 2012. He shares his perspective on building startups.

Kalman Reti, one of the last Symbolics developers, gives a roughly hour-long talk on Symbolics Lisp machines. It covers the machines and their environment from an insider's perspective.

Philip Roberts explains the JavaScript event loop, call stack, callbacks and asynchronous behavior with live visualizations using a tool he built. It demystifies terms like non-blocking and single-threaded.

David Beazley's PyCon India closing keynote, in which he live-codes a stack machine and grows it into an interpreter that runs WebAssembly, then uses it to play a Rust-written game. It requires no prior WebAssembly knowledge.

Cliff Click, author of HotSpot's JIT compiler, shares hard-won advice for people writing virtual machines at the VMSS16 workshop. Topics include interpreters, JITs and performance lessons.

Bryan Cantrill presents Manta, an object store with in-situ compute that lets tools like grep, awk, and sed run map-reduce style over huge data. He frames it as bringing the Unix philosophy to big data.

Rob Pike shows how the Go text/template lexer is built, using state functions, goroutines and channels. The talk was given at a Google Technology User Group in Sydney in 2011.

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

A 2008 Google Tech Talk in which Slava Pestov introduces Factor, a concatenative language influenced by Forth, Lisp and Smalltalk. It covers the interactive environment, metaprogramming, and the language's modern high-level features and libraries.

Jon Purdy's Stanford EE380 seminar giving an overview of concatenative programming, from function composition theory and history down to low-level implementation and correctness benefits.

A Google I/O 2013 talk by Android audio engineers on why reliable, low-latency audio is hard on the platform. It covers problem areas across the stack, platform work underway and techniques apps can use.

Geoff Hinton's 2010 Google Tech Talk on deep belief networks, learning layers of representation one at a time from unlabeled data, and extending them with multiplicative interactions.

Peter Hutterer's linux.conf.au 2020 talk on creating libinput, the unified userspace input library, and the difficulties of handling the many quirks of input devices.

Historian Doron Swade tells the story of Charles Babbage's quest to build the Difference Engine and the construction of Difference Engine No. 2 at the Science Museum. The talk covers Babbage's motivation, his machines and Ada Lovelace's insight into the Analytical Engine.

Day one of the X.Org Developer's Conference 2020 stream, including talks on the Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan driver, the WSL graphics architecture, X11 and Wayland apps in WSL, and Mesa for D3D12.

Aaron Patterson's RailsConf 2011 talk on Rails 3.1 performance, showing why deeper Rack middleware stacks slow Rails and how a shallower pipeline helps. It also touches on Rack API design.

A Curry On talk by Lars Bak, known for V8 and Dart, on building a secure and robust IoT development platform. It discusses language and VM design choices for small devices.

Vlambeer's Jan Willem Nijman shows how to make an action game feel great by stacking small effects like screenshake, recoil and particles onto a basic shooter. It was presented at INDIGO Classes 2013.

Sam Stephenson's RailsConf 2016 talk on Turbolinks 5, showing how small teams can ship fast Rails apps in the browser and hybrid iOS and Android apps sharing one set of web views.

Rick Reed of WhatsApp explains at Erlang Factory 2014 how the service scaled to billions of messages with a very small engineering team. He covers the FreeBSD and Erlang stack, Mnesia usage, server counts and bottleneck work.

Bryan Cantrill of Oxide Computer Company gives a Stanford EE380 talk on rethinking the server. He argues that hyperscaler-style rack-scale machines with open firmware, RISC-V and Rust should be available to everyone, not just the giants.

Gerald Sussman's 2011 Strange Loop keynote argues we still do not know how to compute, comparing biological systems with how we program machines. It touches on propagators, constraint programming and robustness.

Alex Russell's Chrome Dev Summit 2016 talk on building web experiences that work on slow, flaky networks and low-power devices. It argues developers should focus on the performance of real-world mobile hardware rather than desktop machines.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2016 talk on lifetime safety in C++, aiming for code free of leaks and dangling pointers by default. It covers smart pointers, ownership, reference counting pitfalls and deferred reclamation resembling garbage collection.

Without Boats, a Rust language team member, explains the design of Rust's async/await at RustLatam 2019. He covers the history and constraints behind zero-cost, allocation-free async state machines.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2019 talk on the mental habits behind effective programming, drawn from coaching, teaching and StackOverflow. He covers problem decomposition, chunking, managing working memory and getting unstuck.

Bryan Cantrill's Velocity NYC 2015 talk argues for running containers directly on bare metal rather than layering them on virtual machines. He covers the history of containers and how SmartOS runs Linux workloads via syscall emulation.

Kirk McKusick gives a narrative history of BSD from its start at UC Berkeley in the late 1970s through the 1980s releases and the lawsuit that led to 4.4BSD-Lite in 1992. It is full of anecdotes from a key developer.

David Schachter describes how he made a data-collection Python program run 114,000 times faster, drawing on decades of experience. The talk covers pipelining, cache effects and other optimization lessons.

Andrej Karpathy, then Tesla's head of AI, gives a CVPR 2021 workshop keynote on how Autopilot's neural networks work. A large part covers the move to a vision-only stack, including why radar was dropped and how vision produces depth estimates.

Nada Amin's Strange Loop talk on programming languages that build on themselves, centered on towers of interpreters and nestable interpretation in Scheme. She shows how interpreters can be stacked and collapsed.

Tesla's full AI Day 2022 presentation, covering the Tesla Bot hardware and software, Full Self-Driving planning and perception, the occupancy network, data labeling, simulation and Dojo training infrastructure.

Rick Reed of WhatsApp speaks at MeetBSD about running a messaging service on FreeBSD and Erlang at huge scale. He covers the stack, tuning and the challenges of millions of connections per host.

Go runtime contributor Dmitry Vyukov looks inside the Go scheduler, explaining how goroutines and channels are implemented. He covers the main scheduler components and overall operation, then goes into details such as preemption and stacks.

Cuong Do of YouTube describes how a handful of engineers scaled the site, covering hardware, software and database scalability challenges during its rapid growth. The talk was given at the 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability.