tech-talks

Some talks that I really enjoyed

• Mark Allen
  • All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again, Strange Loop 2014
• Jade Allen
  • All About Regular Expressions, Strange Loop 2022
    • Stephen Kleene pronounced his name CLAY-nee.
    • PCRE is by Philip Hazel
• André Arko
  • Lies, Damn Lies, and Metrics
    • "Averages convince you you understand"
    • "Averages are lie-candy for your brain"
    • "If your program isn't running while your program is running, how do you tell?"
• Gary Bernhardt
  • Boundaries
  • The Birth & Death of JavaScript
• Runar Bjarnason
  • Constraints Liberate, Liberties Constrain, Scala World 2015
  • Functional Programming is Terrible, Northeast Scala Symposium 2014
  • Design Principles From Functional Programming, (podcast) January 2018
• Eugenia Cheng
  • Category Theory and Life, YOW! Lambda Jam 2018
    • "You can make all your dreams come true, just by having the right dreams."
    • "I dream of having coffee every morning...and it comes true!"
    • (on identities) "It's not very interesting, but it's very important. Just like lots of people, who are not very interesting, but are very important."
    • "The smallest possible category is very difficult to draw because it's empty. So (gesturing at a blank page) there it is."
    • (on duality) "If you look at someone from behind, is it a different person?"
    • "Smoothies are not a free construction."
  • The Art of Logic: How to Make Sense in a World that Doesn't, Talks at Google 2018
• Alex Crichton
  • Intro to Rust
• Will Crichton
  • Type-Driven API Design in Rust
• Ben Dechrai
  • Writing Viruses for Fun, not Profit, Linux Conf AU 2019
• Jay Dixit
  • Emacs For Writers, New York Emacs Meetup 2015
• Michael Feathers
  • Unconditional Code, GOTO Chicago 2018
• Richard Feynman
  • Computers from the Inside Out, Idiosyncratic Thinking 1985
• Brendan Fong
  • 18.S097: Applied Category Theory, with David Spivak, MIT 2019
  • 18.S097: Programming with Categories, with David Spivak and Bartosz Milewski, MIT 2020
• Evelina Gabašová
  • Tabs, spaces and salaries: a data science detective story, NDC Oslo 2018
• Alex Gaynor and Geoffrey Thomas
  • Writing Linux Kernel Modules in Safe Rust, Linux Security Summit 2019
    • "But these are all silly user-space problems; kernel programmers are very serious and would not introduce the same sorts of bugs into their programs. So surely the numbers are more promising about kernel space."
  • Alex Gaynor's blog
    • Modern C++ Won't Save Us
    • Introduction to Memory Unsafety for VPs of Engineering
    • DevOps vs. Platform Engineering
• Aja Hammerly
  • 4 Programming Paradigms in 45 Minutes, RubyConf 2017
• Gjeta Gjyshinca
  • Monad I Love You Now Get Out Of My Type System, Strange Loop 2022
• Markus Hauck
  • When Everything Fits: The Beauty of Composition, flatMap Oslo 2019
• Rich Hickey
  • Are We There Yet?, JVM Languages Summit 2009
  • Simple Made Easy, Strange Loop 2011 (Remastered in 2021! Original version here)
  • The Value of Values, Jax Conference 2012
  • Design, Composition, and Performance, Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise 2013 (Remastered in 2021! Original version here)
  • Effective Programs: 10 Years of Clojure, Clojure/conj 2017
    • This is the only one I've seen in person (Clojure/conj was right here in Baltimore that year!)
• Heidi Howard
  • Distributed Consensus Revised, PWLConf 2019
    • This is not a blockchain talk
  • SERadio Episode 377: Heidi Howard on Distributed Consensus (podcast)
• Martin Kleppmann
  • Transactions: myths, surprises and opportunities, Strange Loop 2015
  • Turning the database inside out with Apache Samza, Strange Loop 2014
• Lindsey Kuper
  • Abstractions for Expressive, Efficient Parallel and Distributed Computing
    • "These tasks are not so much sharing as fighting viciously over a piece of state."
• Gabriel Lebec
  • A Flock of Functions: Combinators, Lambda Calculus & Church Encodings in JavaScript, August 2017
    • slides and things on github
• Jennifer Lewis
  • Clojure Dispatches from a National Research Lab, Clojure/west 2017
• Tim Mecklem
  • Building an Artificial Pancreas with Elixir and Nerves, ElixirConf 2017
• Chris McCord
  • Phoenix LiveView - Interactive Apps without Javascript, ElixirConf EU 2019
• James Mickens
  • Q: Why Do Keynote Speakers Keep Suggesting That Improving Security Is Possible? A: Because Keynote Speakers Make Bad Life Decisions and Are Poor Role Models, USENIX Security Symposium 2018
• Bartosz Milewski
  • Truth about Types, Lambda Days 2016
    • Unintended pun? "One attempt at this is homotopy type theory (HoTT), which is very hot right now."
  • Category Theory playlist
  • Category Theory II playlist
  • Category Theory III playlist
• Yaron Minsky
  • Effective ML, Harvard CS51 class 2010
  • Effective ML part 1 and part 2, Harvard CS51 class 2011
  • Types, and Why You Should Care, Recurse Center 2018
  • Data Driven UIs, Incrementally, Strange Loop 2018
• Carol Nichols
  • Rust: A Language for the Next 40 Years, Philly ETE 2019
• Jason Orendorff
  • Building on an unsafe foundation Rust Belt Rust 2017
    • "Rust will help you understand the rules that good C++ programmers have in their heads that they got the hard way."
• Ben Orenstein
  • You really should know a little bit of Clojure, RubyConf Uruguay 2014
• Lisa Passing
  • Functional Rust - An Exploration, Lambda Days 2018
    • "Once you've learned how to walk through this wall...you can walk through walls."
  • An adequate intro to ClojureScript, RuhrJS 2017
  • Making a game in Rust, RustFest Zürich 2017
  • Making video games and learning Clojure, clojureD 2017
    • "There's three ways to lose in this game and no way to win"
• Paul Phillips
  • Things and Cothings, Scala World 2015
• Rob Pike
  • Concurrency Is Not Parallelism, Waza 2012
    • blog post with links to slides
• Emily Riehl
  • Stable Marriage Problem part 1 and part 2, Numberphile
  • A Categorical View of Computational Effects, C◦mp◦se :: Conference 2017
  • A categorical view of computational effects, Lambda World 2019
    • "Programs should form a category. In other words, programs should be composable."
• Amar Shah
  • Point-Free or Die: Tacit Programming in Haskell and Beyond, Strange Loop 2016
• Emily Shea
  • Perl Out Loud, YAPC::NA 2019
• Mary Sheeran
  • In praise of Higher Order Functions and of some friends and heroes, Lambda Days 2018
• Stuart Sierra
  • Homoiconicity: It Is What It Is
• Tereza Sokol
  • If Coco Chanel Reviewed Elm, Elm-conf 2017
  • Elm-plot: the big picture, Elm Europe 2017
• David Spivak
  • Category Theory - λConf 2017
    • Part 1
    • Part 2
    • Part 3
    • Part 4
    • Part 5
    • Part 6
  • (see also Brendan Fong, above)
• Guy Steele
  • It's Time for a New Old Language, Clojure/conj 2017
    • "Don't you think it's ironic that type theorists, who want to talk about strongly-typed languages in a rigorous manner, talk to themselves with an untyped language that has no rigorous specification?"
  • Growing a Language, OOPSLA 1998
  • Data Parallel Algorithms, MIT 1990
• Tom Stuart
  • Progamming with Something, RubyConf 2021
    • Programming with Nothing, Ru3y Manor 2011
  • I Have No Idea What I’m Doing, Scottish Ruby Conference 2014
  • Lots more!
• Bret Victor
  • The Future of Programming, DBX 2013
• Philip Wadler
  • Propositions as Types
• Jim Weinrich
  • Y Not - Adventures in Functional Programming, RubyConf 2012
• George Wilson
  • Functional Programming in Education, YOW! Lambda Jam 2019
  • An Intuition for Propagators, C◦mp◦se :: Conference Melbourne 2019
    • I often say things like, "if you can get mathematicians to work on your problem, you should" and "if mathematicians have already solved your problem, you should look at their solution." Wilson says kind of the same thing near the end here.
• Scott Wlaschin
  • Domain Modeling Made Functional, Explore DDD 2019
  • The Functional Programmer's Toolkit, NDC London 2019
  • "One of the things I've started doing in consulting is to stop using labels and jargon as much as possible. It's so easy for words to become fetishized. And then the label itself becomes the goal" -- @ScottWlaschin
  • The power of composition, DotNext 2019 Moscow
    • Video for my "Power of Composition" talk at @DotNextConf is now up. Every time I do it I tweak it a bit to make it better, so this is my favorite version so far :) -- @ScottWlaschin
• Joyce Xu
  • Building Machine Learning Models with Clojure and Cortex, Clojure/conj 2017
    • A really understandable explanation of machine learning!
    • Even if you don't care at all about Clojure or Cortex, you'd do well to watch the first 14 minutes of this talk.

Lightning Talks!

• Gary Bernhardt: Wat, CodeMash 2012
• Aaron Brooks: Sometimes it's so obvious in hindsight, Clojure/conj 2017
• John Cinnamond: How to read Soft Typing, BathRuby 2015
  • Longer talk at RubyConf 2015: Softly, softly typing
• David Farrell: Cache::Reddit, YAPC::NA 2017
• Chris Hardie: On Framing (PDF), YAPC::NA 2010
  • I referenced this talk to great effect a while back! (see comments)
• Jonathan Rockaway: Better is better‎, YAPC::NA 2012
• Baron Schwartz: Tuning a Guitar with Science
  • How to Tune A Guitar (Or Any Instrument)
• Doug Zongker: Chicken Chicken Chicken: Chicken Chicken, AAAS 2007
  • There is also a paper

More links

• Talks I liked, by Igal Tabachnik @hmemcpy

Talk title clichés

You could use one of these for the title of your talk, but why not think of a good name instead?

• X for fun and profit
• X or: how I learned to stop worrying and love Y
• X: the good, the bad, and the ugly
• X considered harmful
• How to X. Not!
• X...like a boss!
• X...FTW!