success

Alain de Botton gives a TED talk questioning how we define success and failure. He argues that snobbery and the assumption that outcomes are fully earned make career anxiety worse.

A short pre-recorded talk by Rich Sutton for the World AI Conference in Shanghai arguing that succession from humanity to AI is inevitable. He lays out his view of that transition.

Mark Seemann argues that functional programming naturally yields many of the best practices object-oriented developers learn painfully. He shows how functional architecture leads to a pit of success, with a pure core and impure shell.

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.

John McCall of Apple's Swift team presents at CppNow 2023 on introducing a memory-safe successor language into large C++ code bases. He argues incremental improvement of C++ hits hard limits and explains Swift's C++ interoperability for gradual migration.

Konrad Malawski's Strange Loop 2023 talk shows how the FoundationDB team adopted Swift incrementally in a C++ codebase. It covers Swift's C++ interoperability, which let them move single functions or entire types over one at a time.

Chandler Carruth's CppNow 2023 talk describes Carbon as a successor language to C++ rather than a superset, focusing on C++ interop and a path to memory safety in large existing codebases. It explains why Carbon takes a different approach from Cpp2 and Circle.

Joseph Henrich's Talks at Google presentation of his book. He argues that human success comes from collective brains and cultural learning across generations rather than individual intelligence.

Eduardo Briceno gives a TEDx talk on mindset, contrasting fixed and growth views of ability. He argues that believing abilities can be developed encourages challenge, deliberate practice and grit.

Alexander Bruce's GDC talk on making Antichamber, from working alone in a bedroom to winning acclaim at the IGF. It focuses on the psychological challenge of seven years of solo development.

Mark Russinovich's closing keynote at Rust Nation UK on Microsoft's adoption of Rust, covering security gains, integration challenges, performance results and lessons learned.

Bill Gross, who has founded and incubated many start-ups, ranked hundreds of companies on five factors. He presents the one factor that stood out as the biggest predictor of success.

Clayton Christensen's TEDx talk applying business theory to personal life. He argues that career success is not the right measure of a life and urges attention to relationships and values.

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.

Maciej Ceglowski's talk at Web Directions argues that small teams and lone programmers can build sustainable businesses without chasing Silicon Valley's grow-or-die model. He offers alternative, more achievable definitions of success.

A 16-minute Y Combinator Startup School talk in which Sam Altman lays out what makes a startup succeed. It covers building a product people tell friends about, exponential markets, real versus fake trends, and having an ambitious vision.

Andrew Ng presents unsupervised feature learning and deep learning, showing how algorithms can learn representations from unlabeled data instead of hand-designed features. He gives examples in vision and audio, including visualizations of features learned by successive layers.

Paul Graham speaks at Startup School 2008 about how to create a successful startup. His talk emphasizes being good, not just avoiding being evil, as a strategic advantage.

David Ungar of IBM Research reflects at Stanford on the Self language project and argues the real legacy of ideas is the people. He covers its history, philosophy, successes and failures.

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.

Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games explains at GDC 2016 how an indie developer survived eleven years without a hit by building a long tail of games and redefining success.

Tracy Young, a former construction engineer and cofounder of PlanGrid, speaks at the 2015 Y Combinator Female Founders Conference. She talks about building software for construction superintendents and about customer success.

Amy Cuddy's TED talk arguing that adopting expansive postures, or power posing, can boost feelings of confidence and affect success. A note on the video points to the later reproducibility debate over its findings.

Andrei Alexandrescu's CppCon 2015 talk on handling exceptional control flow declaratively in C++. It uses scope guards with success and failure variants, built on std::uncaught_exceptions, to replace ad hoc RAII classes and rethrowing try/catch blocks.

A two-minute excerpt of Robert Kennedy's 1968 University of Kansas speech criticizing GDP as a measure of national worth. He notes it counts harmful spending while ignoring what makes life worthwhile.

Tanya Reilly's LeadDev talk on glue work, the invisible coordination and support tasks engineers do that keep teams successful but can hurt careers.

A GDC 2015 talk in which Natalya Tatarchuk describes the multithreaded renderer Bungie built for Destiny. It covers the low-latency architecture across platforms, its successes and its challenges.

A one-minute clip of Peter Norvig saying that Google found programming contest success correlates negatively or poorly with job performance. The description links to a blog post discussing it.

A 1987 talk in which John Backus, creator of Fortran, presents function-level programming and the FL language, a successor to his FP work. It is an archival recording with links to the related paper.