unity dots

A Strange Loop talk presenting an open-source library that integrates Clojure into the Unity 3D game engine. It covers REPL-based live coding, macros, DSLs and persistent data structures for game development.

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.

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address, told through three stories: connecting the dots, love and loss, and death. It includes the calligraphy class and the 'stay hungry, stay foolish' close.

A dotScale 2014 talk by Robert Kennedy, a former healthcare.gov SRE who later worked at Google, about the engineering effort to rescue the troubled site. It explains the technical and organizational problems behind the failed launch.

John Graham-Cumming of Cloudflare talks at dotScale 2015 about handling roughly 10 trillion log lines a month. The talk touches on Cloudflare's hardware, its logging stack and its use of Lua in Nginx.

Gabriella Gonzalez argues that developers misunderstand marketing as deception or hype, and applies the technology-adoption ideas of Crossing the Chasm to Haskell. She looks at what keeps Haskell from reaching mainstream programmers and what a community can do about it.

Jared Mauch tells how he got fed up with poor internet options in rural Michigan and built his own fiber network to his town. The talk was given at NLNOG Live in September 2020.

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.

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address, in which he tells three stories from his life about connecting the dots, love and loss, and death. He urges graduates to follow their dreams and find opportunity in setbacks.

Donnie Berkholz of RedMonk gives a Monki Gras talk arguing that abusive, toxic contributors damage open source projects. He makes the case for removing them from communities.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, gives an elm-conf 2016 talk on the non-code side of building a language. It covers the philosophy behind Elm's development approach, including batching work and the priorities of different language communities.

Josh Wardle, later the creator of Wordle, talks at SF Tech Poetics about why April Fools' Day in Silicon Valley is often lame. He shares lessons from building The Button and Place at Reddit.

Steve Jobs's 2005 Stanford commencement address, built around three stories: connecting the dots, love and loss including being fired from Apple, and death. It is a 15-minute talk on finding work you love.

Guy Steele's classic 1998 OOPSLA keynote on how a programming language must grow with its user community. He delivers it in a playful style, starting with only monosyllabic words and defining new terms as he goes.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, discusses the hard parts of running an open source project: online community conflict, why its patterns arise, and a cultural history of open source. He offers ideas for more civil, productive communication.

Captain Disillusion's comedic talk at the 2018 Blender Conference recounts how he uses Blender as a production tool for his VFX-debunking web series. It is part case study and part love letter to the Blender community.

Robert Martin's RailsConf 2009 talk looks at why Smalltalk lost out despite its technical strengths. He draws lessons about language communities and arrogance that he argues could hurt Ruby too.

Christopher Alexander's keynote at OOPSLA 1996 on patterns in architecture, addressed to the software community. He moves beyond patterns toward deeper ideas of wholeness and living structure.

Scott Meyers' keynote at DConf 2014, drawing on 25 years of C++ experience to offer the D language community a plea about what it should avoid. It centers on the accumulated complexity and pitfalls of C++ as a cautionary tale.

Skateboarding pioneer Rodney Mullen talks about how the open skate community and its environments drive the invention of new tricks out of pure passion. He draws parallels to collaboration and open source.

Stuart Halloway of Cognitect argues for debugging with the scientific method: form hypotheses, try to falsify them, and write everything down. The talk is given to the Clojure community but applies to any language.

Keith Packard traces the 35-year history of the X Window System at linux.conf.au 2020. He uses X to examine licensing, corporate interests and community dynamics in free software, including Unix workstation vendors and Stallman's influence.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2019 talk on the split in the C++ community over exceptions and RTTI. He proposes making exceptions cheaper and more usable, including a zero-overhead, Result-like design.

Raph Levien presents Xi editor at RustConf 2016, a high-performance text editor built in Rust. The talk goes into technical details, building polished GUI apps, and running a community-focused open source project.

A one-hour OCaml Workshop 2020 talk on the state of the OCaml Platform, covering IDE support, next steps for the tooling and plans for 2020-2021.

Steve Jobs's 2005 Stanford commencement address, in which he tells three stories about connecting the dots, love and loss, and death, including his remarks on typography.

C J Silverio, former npm CTO, explains how the JavaScript package commons ended up in the hands of a for-profit company with no accountability. She discusses the cost of running a registry and what the community should do next.

Andrew Kelley's roadmap talk on upcoming Zig compiler milestones, focused on compilation speed. It was given at a Zig community event in 2022.

Larry Wall speaks at Google's Chicago office in 2008 about the Perl community, the language, and Perl 6. The talk touches on grammars, macros and error messages.

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.

Kees Cook of Google gives a Linux Foundation talk on the Kernel Self Protection Project, which aims to harden Linux against attackers. He surveys threats, the state of available defensive technologies and a year of community progress.

A Google talk from the Chisel community in which engineers recount designing the Edge TPU with the Chisel hardware construction language. It covers the productivity gains and the problems they hit.

David Nolen reviews the first five years of ClojureScript, documenting its landmarks and looking ahead to the next five. It is a history-and-roadmap talk from the Clojure community.

A GopherCon 2014 session where Blake Mizerany replaced his planned talk with a panel discussion with members of the Go team. It covers Go's design choices and community questions.