sync engine

A Linear engineer talks about scaling the company's sync engine, which keeps client data local and synchronized. It follows an earlier talk on the same system.

React Helsinki meetup recording featuring a talk on lessons with Apollo GraphQL and Linear co-founder Tuomas Artman on real-time sync for web apps. The sync talk explains Linear's local-first architecture.

Aaron Boodman of Replicache asks why sync engines have not yet fixed web app complexity and what is missing for them to go mainstream. The talk lays out the ideas that led to the Zero sync engine.

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.

Steve Klabnik walks through the history of Rust and how its design evolved toward async/await, including the alternatives tried and dropped. He also discusses the difficulty of adding a major feature to a language.

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.

David Beazley's workshop screencast builds asynchronous programming in Python from scratch, starting from callbacks and continuations and replacing threads to show how concurrency works underneath.

Zig creator Andrew Kelley's RedisConf 2020 talk on modeling data flow with asynchronous I/O in Zig. It explains how Zig's async/await avoids function coloring, and Loris Cro demonstrates OkRedis, a zero-allocation Redis client.

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.

Nathaniel J. Smith's PyCon 2018 talk introducing Trio, a Python concurrency library designed around usability and structured concurrency. He live-codes a problem and analyzes pitfalls in other async libraries.

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.

Hillel Wayne reports on interviews with 17 people who have worked as both software and traditional engineers. He argues the fields are fundamentally the same and have much to learn from each other.

A Netflix JavaScript talk on using Reactive Extensions (Rx) for asynchronous UI code. It covers Observables, composing events such as drag and drop, and sequencing Ajax requests.

Nathan Kutz presents the spatio-temporal dynamics of rotating detonation rocket engines, including combustion fronts that behave like solitons. He shows a bifurcation analysis of a multiscale model that captures the main features.

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.

Martin Kleppmann's Local-First Conf talk reviewing where the local-first idea came from, where it stands five years after the essay, and what the community should work toward. He argues for generic sync infrastructure.

Brian Bucklew of Freehold Games discusses design decisions behind Caves of Qud and Sproggiwood at IRDC 2015. The talk centers on data-driven, event-driven engine design.

A 2015 GDC talk by Bungie's Barry Genova on how Destiny's engine was restructured into a job graph with limited thread pre-emption. It is aimed at programmers of demanding game engines.

Miguel de Icaza's GodotCon 2023 talk on Swift bindings for Godot. He argues that garbage-collector pauses in C# are a persistent problem and that Swift's reference counting avoids them.

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.

Elasticsearch engineer and Lucene committer Adrien Grand explains the design decisions inside a Lucene index and what problems it can and cannot solve. The talk goes into how Lucene stores data for fast search and analytics.

Neil Fraser of Google presents Differential Synchronization, the algorithm behind MobWrite, for keeping multiple copies of a document in sync in real time. The talk argues the approach is robust, convergent and efficient.

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.

A four-pane view of Armadillo Aerospace's Mod vehicle on a June 2010 boosted hop. The flight includes engine shutdown, drogue chute deployment, an engine restart and a safe landing.

Jonathan Worthington's YAPC Asia 2015 talk on parallelism, concurrency and asynchrony in Perl 6. It covers the language's concurrency features.

Stuart Armstrong of the Future of Humanity Institute gives an Oxford physics talk on what exploratory engineering suggests about the Fermi paradox. He argues that von Neumann probes and Dyson spheres are plausibly buildable and asks what traces advanced civilizations would leave.

Alex Ionescu's OffensiveCon 2019 keynote on how reverse engineering is done on Windows without conventional reversing. It covers legal ways to obtain names of variables, exported functions and structures.

A Rubber Duck Engineering episode on the years before Flutter, covering web projects and three JavaScript frameworks that influenced it, and the early DOM-based, network-loaded Flutter.

A short video explaining the Intel Management Engine, a hidden embedded computer inside Intel machines with deep access to hardware. It is presented from an insider's perspective and raises backdoor and NSA concerns.

Christopher Domas's REcon 2013 talk on dynamic binary visualization for reverse engineering. He shows how rendering binary data as interactive visual maps and trigraphs reveals structure that hex dumps hide, leading to his Cantor.dust tool.

In a long live-coding session, Andreas Kling works on making the Cookie Clicker game playable in the Ladybird browser from SerenityOS. He tracks down bugs in the browser engine and fixes them.

Jack Moffitt presents Servo, an experimental browser engine written in Rust and designed to be parallel at every level, using multiple cores, the GPU, fork-join concurrency and SIMD. The talk covers motivations, architecture and plans for the project.

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 Google Developers Q&A in which Blink engineering leads and the PM answer the community's top questions about the new Blink rendering engine forked from WebKit.

Jon Gjengset's long live-coding stream explains Rust's Pin and Unpin types: why they exist, how they work, and how they connect to futures and async/await. It also covers moving from pre-pinning code to the new model.

Ryan Dahl's JSConf EU talk introducing Node.js to the world. He explains the motivation for event-driven, non-blocking I/O, with JavaScript chosen mainly for its asynchronous nature.

Dennis Gustafsson, creator of Teardown, presents how he parallelized the physics solver for an upcoming game, followed by a Q&A. The talk was given at the Better Software Conference 2025.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2019 talk on the mental strategies he uses when programming in Python, such as chunking, solving a simpler related problem, and repeating tasks manually until patterns emerge. This version is re-synced with the slides.

A FOSDEM 2023 talk from the Matrix team on Matrix 2.0, covering sliding sync, the Element X client rewrite and next-generation calling. It explains how Matrix aims to match the speed of proprietary messengers.

A 36C3 talk on the AMD Platform Security Processor, an undocumented ARM core inside AMD CPUs that runs before the main processor. The speakers present their reverse engineering of its internals.