technical interviews

Moishe Lettvin, a former Google engineer, shares lessons from 250 interviews and his time on the hiring committee. He tells how the committee given anonymized packets, including its own, would hire almost none of them.

Adam Tornhill's GOTO Copenhagen 2019 talk on how to prioritize technical debt in large codebases. It argues for combining code complexity with change frequency (hotspots) from version control data, rather than trying to quantify debt in the abstract.

A live mock programmer interview in which Casey Muratori interviews game developer Shawn McGrath using a less confrontational format devised by Chris Hecker. It gets deep into technical details while showing how the candidate actually thinks and works.

The Futurama clip where Hermes is told he is technically correct, the best kind of correct. It comes from season 2, episode 14.

A demo of writing technical documents in Emacs Org mode using org-babel, so that code blocks and generated content stay consistent when things change. The author shares the demo files and his dotfiles.

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

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, interviews Alan Kay at Code Mesh. They discuss the meaning of object orientation, message passing, the META II paper, and the state of computer science.

Daniele Procida's PyCon AU 2017 talk presents a system that divides documentation into four kinds, usually drawn as four quadrants. He explains why mixing them makes docs poor and how separating them improves writing.

Jonathan Schiefer interviews Larry Wall, creator of Perl, in a 33-minute conversation. Wall discusses his self-designed linguistics degree and how language and programming overlap.

A Fox News segment in which Ami Horowitz interviews people at UC Berkeley and in Harlem about whether voter ID laws are racist.

A one-minute clip of Bryan Cranston at an Academy new-member reception, advising actors to approach auditions without desperation and focus on solving the problem rather than landing the job.

The earliest filmed version of the Turbo Encabulator technical-jargon parody, shot in the late 1970s with narrator Bud Haggert. It deadpans a stream of meaningless engineering language.

Two Google engineers perform a mock coding interview and then discuss best practices for candidates, including asking clarifying questions and communicating while solving.

Unreleased 1996 footage of the Wired editors interviewing Bill Gates when he visited their office. Gates talks about software, the internet and Microsoft's thinking at the time. The video is about 53 minutes long.

A GDC 2015 talk by Arc System Works technical artist Junya Motomura on how Guilty Gear Xrd rebuilt a classic 2D fighter in full 3D while keeping a hand-drawn look. It covers the art and programming R&D and the stylistic decisions behind it.

A short scene from the Amazon series Patriot in which a spy character gives a deadpan, jargon-filled lecture about pipes and nut plate spacing. It is a comedic bit of corporate-cover absurdity.

A short clip of the famous Hitchhiker-style circular narration of a missile guidance system explaining how it knows where it is by knowing where it isn't. It is a deadpan bit of technical-sounding absurdity about subtraction and navigation.

Peter Norvig answers the top questions submitted by reddit users in a 27-minute interview. Topics include programming language choice, AI, and workplace design.

Satirist Ami Horowitz interviews people at UC Berkeley and in Harlem about whether voter ID laws suppress the black vote. It is a short Fox News segment contrasting responses from white liberals with those from black residents.

A compilation of the 1977 BBC series The Secret War, a documentary on British scientific and technical efforts in WWII, including radar, German navigation beams and V-weapons. It features interviews with people who were there, including Albert Speer.

The introductory lecture of Richard Hamming's capstone course, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. It focuses on style of thinking and on educating rather than training, using technical material only as illustration.

MIT 22.01 lecture by Michael Short explaining the Chernobyl accident technically, including RBMK reactor positive feedback, xenon poisoning and the cascade of human errors during the test.

Practical Engineering explains Mechanically Stabilized Earth, where layers of reinforcement make soil strong enough to hold heavy loads, shown with a sand structure supporting a car. It notes that MSE walls are everywhere in infrastructure.

R. Stanley Williams of HP Labs gives a keynote on the memristor, covering the physics, crossbar computation, and potential for memory and new computer architectures.

Guy Steele's 1998 OOPSLA keynote on designing a programming language that its users can grow. He builds the talk using only one-syllable words and terms he has defined, to demonstrate the idea.

Brian Kernighan interviews Unix co-creator Ken Thompson at VCF East 2019. Thompson recounts how he was hired at Bell Labs, writing the Unix kernel in about three weeks, the origins of B and TMG, pipes, and other anecdotes.

A Commodore 64 demo by Linus Akesson that fits video and music into 256 bytes, winning the Oldskool 4K Intro compo at Revision 2017. A technical write-up accompanies it.

Joe Rogan interviews Matthew Walker, Berkeley neuroscience professor and author of Why We Sleep. They discuss what sleep does for the brain and body, the effects of sleep deprivation, and sleep myths.

A one-hour 2019 KOMO News documentary hosted by Eric Johnson on Seattle's homelessness and drug crisis, with interviews and looks at proposed solutions including a drug court program in Rhode Island. It argues addiction and mental illness are at the core of the problem.

Bruce Dang of Microsoft gives a 27C3 talk on how the Stuxnet vulnerabilities were found and analyzed. He walks through the techniques used to triage them and the details of each zero-day exploit, down to the opcode level.

Tom Murphy (suckerpinch) presents a deliberately trollish computer architecture built on IEEE-754 floating point, using NaN and infinity to define logic gates. He builds working hardware around the idea.

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.

John Carmack's long QuakeCon 2012 keynote, a free-ranging talk covering software engineering, game platforms, game streaming, and his early head-mounted display and VR work.

James Powell's nearly two-hour PyData talk builds up Python's data model, decorators, generators and context managers, coding live in Vim. It aims to take intermediate programmers toward real Python expertise.

Andrew "bunnie" Huang examines how realistic hardware supply chain attacks are, from rogue insiders to nation states, in the wake of the Bloomberg Businessweek report. He explains how undocumented components could be hidden on boards and how hard they are to spot.

Damian Conway's hour-long keynote at the Perl conference, On the Shoulders of Giants, showing off Perl 6 (Raku) features with history, algorithms and a quantum math operator built with grammars. It is delivered with comic flair.

Bryan Cantrill of Joyent presents Manta, an internet-facing object store that lets you run compute directly on the data. The talk is peppered with ZFS history and Cantrill's trademark commentary on the industry.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk in which Cliff Click of Azul Systems presents a lock-free concurrent hash table that scales to 768 CPUs. He explains why it is correct by reasoning in a different way than usual happens-before and memory-order arguments.

John Oliver interviews Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance, including street interviews showing people have not thought about what the government can see. The segment famously frames the issue through private photos.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay on how Akira Kurosawa used movement, weather and composition to tell stories. It draws on clips and interviews with other filmmakers.