While rummaging and tidying up my backups I've found some archived talks that I watched (and then archived) after suggestions from friends, so now I am going share them again hoping they can be interesting also for someone else. They are all related to programming and F/LOSS (Free/Libre Open source Software). The context of the specific conference they are delivered is not very important, the content is.
I will use the YouTube link if I couldn't find any other source but feel free to watch them from any Invidious instance.
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Simple Made Easy by Rich Hickey (Strange Loop, 2011): The author is the creator of the Clojure programming language but in his talk there is very little about it. The talk is dense of concepts but very entertaining. The gist of it is that we as developers should learn to recognize what is "simple" and what is "easy". We are not always empowered to choose the tools that we prefer but it's a good exercise to know if we are in front of something that will have a substantial future maintenance burden.
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L'open source è un fiume in piena ("Open source is a rushing river") by Salvatore Sanfilippo (TEDxCapoPeloro, 2019): original link. A brief talk by the original author of Redis. It's a short overview of how he could create one of the most important Open source software (Redis) by leveraging Open source itself. The key takeaway is that Open source is a fundamental multiplier of the software industry and is the key to its future. Use the YouTube automatic subtitle generation, they're pretty good.
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Stewardship Made Practical by Stuart Halloway (Chadev, 2019): at first I was suspicious of this well-dressed and enterprise-y looking speaker but then I was fascinated by the talk and the delivery. The talk can be divided in four parts, the first one ("How to make software") is well-delivered but kind of opinionated and a bit self-celebrating so not greatly interesting, the other three parts (starting at around 00:19:00) are instead why I keep rewatching this talk. The speaker talks about what it is like to be an Open source maintainer, what are the organizational challenges, which sort of people you will interact with, and explains the why of all this, providing some thoughts to improve your understanding and better handle a situation. Reminds of the great manual from Daniel Stenberg, author or
cURL: Uncurled (another suggested read). -
How to help Emacs maintainers by Bastien Guerry (EmacsConf 2021): I've already wrote a detailed article about this talk so I won't repeat myself. An inspiring experience for any open source maintainer underlining the (sometimes) underappreciated qualities such as being a constant contributor, keeping the ship sailing smoothly and being humble about that.
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Principles of Technology Leadership by Bryan Cantrill (Monktoberfest, 2017): The speaker is pretty famous in our circles and has a great curriculum (has worked for Sun Microsystems, Joyent and now Oxide Computer). He is clearly a very skilled speaker and even when he delivers a marketing speech, it's not annoying. In this talk he's hilariously critical to the Amazon leadership principles and in general to the dystopian corporative world. The talk itself is a bit slow but in my opinion worth the time.
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Wat by Gary Bernhardt (CodeMash, 2012): a classic. A very short (5 minutes) and hilarious talk that makes fun of Ruby and JavaScript. Absolutely worth a rewatch and a laugh.
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Your Open Source Repo Needs A Project Manager by Alice Cecile (RustConf, 2022): Alice is co-lead of the Bevy Engine (a game engine) and an unstoppable force of nature with a strong focus on how to drive a community around a software project to success. She's very smart and at the same time very open to share her experience. If you can follow her, she speaks and thinks very fast. She has a special place in my heart, she's very inspiring. In this talk she tells about her experience in working in a FOSS projects. There is a lot of actionables.
Bonus, two a few non-technical talk:
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What is (and Why Do) Street Epistemology (Dutch Skeptic Society, 2021): I had this video (and the two following in the series, linked in the video description) laying for months before finally deciding to watch them, I had to overcome the emotional barrier around that word that smells like boredom from kilometers away. Epistemology is nothing but a way to conduct an interview or a discussion about any topic challenging the beliefs of your speaking partner in a non-aggressive, non-manipulative way. People tend to become defensive when discussing something close to their hearts (e.g. politics, religion, ...) but some people don't really know why they're so attached to an opinion, where their beliefs come from. Epistemology tries to lead you through a series of steps to realize whether what you believe is based on solid ground or not. It's hard to conduct such an interview because the interviewer could end up pointing the finger to something you believe that makes no actual sense, and we all believe in nonsensical stuff. The context where this talk is delivered has clearly a strong bias towards dismantling whatever beliefs not founded on science but even when removing this bias, I think the ideas expressed in this talk have some merit. I was recently interviewed by a person that applied some of these techniques and it was a really pleasant experience.
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10 ways to have a better conversation by Celeste Headlee (TEDx, 2015): a short talk with a great delivery, the speaker obviously is a professional. Mentioning the talk just to recommend watching it, the content can be easily summarized here. Tips for an effective conversation:
- do not multi-task
- do not pontificate
- use open-ended questions
- go with the flow
- if you don’t know, say that you don't know
- don't equate your experience with theirs
- try not to repeat yourself
- stay out of the weeds
- listen
- be brief
For more details about this talk, just look up this talk on a search engine, it's all over the place.
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Panic by Cabel Sasser (XOXO Festival, 2024): a really entertaining talk about how the speaker, starting from a painting in a McDonalds fast-food (I refuse to call them "restaurants"), went on a quest to discover a forgotten artist. The story is almost surreal and it is delivered in a very entertaining way, the speaker is just great and keeps you glued to the chair. At the end there's a sort of morale, just mentioned en passant: don't forget to give credit now to someone whose work touched you. From the same speaker, I also recommend this talk delivered at the Game Developers Conference 2024 about the story behind the Playdate, a peculiar handheld video game console they developed.