working backwards

An AWS re:Invent session explaining Amazon's Working Backwards process, where teams start from customer needs and write a press release and FAQ (PR-FAQ) before building. It covers the five customer questions that frame the process.

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk argues that networking should be rethought around named data rather than host-to-host conversations. He contrasts the circuit and datagram views of the internet and sketches content-centric networking as a replacement for the location-centric TCP/IP model.

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk argues for rethinking networking around named data rather than host-to-host connections. He gives the history and the unsolved problems of the current internet architecture.

A two-hour NANOG tutorial by Richard Steenbergen aimed at network engineers, covering optical networking technologies. This is the updated 2017 edition of a recurring talk.

Bungie's David Aldridge explains the networking programming behind Halo: Reach in a 2011 GDC session. It covers how gameplay stays in sync online, including forecasting and state reconciliation.

A short That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch about the perils of working at home, with an adult-humor punchline. It is British TV comedy.

Google's Amin Vahdat gives the ONS 2015 keynote on Google's datacenter networking, including its custom hardware, software-defined networking and very high bisection bandwidth.

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk on rethinking networking around named content instead of host-to-host conversations. He recounts packet-networking history and lays out the content-centric networking idea that later became NDN.

Eric Brandwine's AWS re:Invent 2015 session on how Amazon VPC networking works. It covers the problems the design solved, why traditional approaches do not scale, and the mechanisms used for customer isolation and VPC endpoints.

A 1979 BBC Nationwide report asking whether word processors and networked microprocessors could end office commuting. It shows early word processing and a woman working from home, with surprisingly prophetic predictions.

Mike Boyd takes up Smarter Every Day's challenge to learn to ride the Backwards Brain Bike, a bicycle whose steering is inverted, and rides 50 meters. It shows how hard it is to unlearn a motor skill.

Destin of Smarter Every Day learns to ride a bicycle whose steering is reversed, taking about eight months, and compares it with how his young son learned much faster. It illustrates knowledge versus understanding and brain plasticity in adults versus children.

TheRasteri upgrades a single PC through every Windows version, from early releases through Windows 10, testing that old software keeps running. It is an updated version of the Chain of Fools experiment.

Urs Hoelzle, Google's SVP of infrastructure, gives the 2012 Open Networking Summit keynote on how Google adopted OpenFlow and software-defined networking in its own networks. The slides are linked in the description.

A 2018 GDC talk by NetherRealm's Michael Stallone on the engine changes, optimizations and tooling needed to roll back and re-simulate up to 8 frames in 16 ms in Mortal Kombat and Injustice 2. It is a deep dive into deterministic rollback netcode.

Matthias Wandel shows how his pantorouter, a template router machine, works. The flexible machine cuts joints such as mortise and tenon and dovetails, and plans are available.

A CollegeHumor sketch from the Hardly Working series in which a pair of startup founders pitch a website using incomprehensible buzzwords and branding nonsense. It parodies Silicon Valley startup culture.

BBC Earth shows killer whales working as a pod to create waves that wash seals off ice floes, with the producer explaining how the crew captured behavior once thought a myth.

A South Park clip in which Butters' dad takes a job at an Amazon fulfillment center to make ends meet. It satirizes warehouse work conditions.

A condensed film of Dick Proenneke's footage of building a cabin and living alone in the Alaskan wilderness, using hand tools and local materials. It draws on the 8mm films he shot himself.

James Hamilton's Tuesday Night Live keynote at AWS re:Invent 2016, touring AWS infrastructure at scale including networking, power and custom silicon. It also features NASA JPL's Tom Soderstrom.

Excerpts from Linus Torvalds's DebConf 14 talk on why desktop Linux struggles. He covers application distribution, distros breaking backwards compatibility, wasted package management effort and how Windows does app distribution better.

Dr. Russell Barkley lectures on the neuroanatomy of ADHD and how to treat it, linking executive function and working memory to the disorder. It is part 3 of a CADDAC series.

People Make Games interviewed 16 current and former Valve employees to examine how the company's no-bosses, no-titles structure works in practice, and where it falls short.

A Clojure/conj 2016 talk demoing Barliman, a prototype smart editor that does program synthesis. Given a partial program and tests, it completes the program using a relational interpreter written in miniKanren.

James Hamilton, AWS VP and distinguished engineer, gives an insider view of the innovations behind the AWS cloud at re:Invent 2014. He covers custom hardware, networking, regions and availability zones, and infrastructure at scale.

A 12-minute clip from Joe Rogan's podcast in which former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman describes working for Elon Musk at SpaceX. He discusses Musk's engineering breadth, his Mars-focused decision making and the stress of the job.

A BBC comedy sketch from The One Ronnie starring Ronnie Corbett and Harry Enfield, built around a word-play misunderstanding about a broken BlackBerry. It is about three minutes long.

Tom Scott explains why Windows does not let you name a file CON, tracing the reserved device names back to backwards compatibility with DOS.

Tim Ewald's Clojure/conj talk uses furniture making with hand tools versus machine tools as an allegory for software. It explores how automation changes what we make and how we think about our work, and why Clojure's small set of simple tools matters.

CGP Grey argues that your brain treats a whole home as one room during lockdown, blurring work, rest and leisure. He recommends creating separate spaces and routines for different activities to stay balanced.

Machine Thinking tells the story of the Cold War Heavy Press Program, the giant forging presses that make parts for aircraft, missiles and turbines.

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.

Mark Handley of UCL explains, with simulation visualizations, how early Starlink satellites without inter-satellite links could still give low-latency wide-area communication by hopping via ground relays. He shows it can beat fibre on many long paths.

John Ousterhout's Netdev 0x16 keynote arguing that nearly every aspect of TCP is wrong for the datacenter, from connections and streams to reliable delivery and congestion control. He presents the case for a replacement protocol.

A short clip showing a person touching an active table saw blade with a finger and walking away unharmed, thanks to SawStop's system that stops the blade within milliseconds of skin contact.

Pat Wyatt, a veteran game programmer who worked at Blizzard and ArenaNet, speaks at HandmadeCon 2015 in a conversation with Casey Muratori. He discusses network code and architecture in games he worked on, including mistakes on Diablo and the success of Guild Wars.

Netflix engineer Drew Gallatin's EuroBSDcon 2022 talk quantifies the older FreeBSD optimizations that let Netflix serve web traffic at 800Gb/s, including TSO, LRO, VM page cache zones, asynchronous sendfile and unmapped mbufs.

A NANOG 64 panel with speakers from Comcast, APNIC, T-Mobile and Facebook on deploying IPv6-only networks, including performance data showing IPv6 outperforming NAT-ed IPv4.

A woodworker shows how his table saw accident happened, why it happened and how to avoid a similar one. He describes severe hand lacerations from a blade contact.