Videos

(There's certainly a sense in which you read a video i.e. read and process the interesting visual and audio data from a video, using your eyes, ears and brain.)

Here are some talks I like:

Postcards from the peak of complexiy - Brian Goetz

I found this relateable, and it made me think about wide-scoped solutions and frameworks for solving a problem across the engineering organisation, that I in my ignorance shipped at the peak of comlexity, and how I and others paid for that in time. I loved the metaphor of a "virtuous collapse" after reaching the peak of complexity.

Aspiring to learn the engineering of software - Alan Kay (~1 hour)

This made me think about the level of understanding we have as an industry about the human process of creating software. Sometimes millions are spent, thousands of people are enlisted, yet the result utterly fails. Other times hardly anything is spent, just a handful of people are involved and they are able to change the world. Software engineering has not yet reached the point of being science.

Another point I loved: Nobody fabricates computer chips before they are known to work via simulation. The physical engineering disciplines all follow a similar process of: CAD (Computer Aided Design) => SIM (Simulate) => FAB (Fabricate i.e. build). For example, the manufacter of aeroplanes, buildings, bridges etc. When it comes to software engineering though, we are so caught up in FAB that we hardly design or simulate what we're building. In the talk, Kay notes the irony of software engineers making better design tools for other disciplines than they are willing to make for themselves.

Throughout the talk, the importance of ethics and safety in software engineering is emphasised, and the talk ends with a mention of the hippocratic oath of medicine, and the noticable lack of an equivalent in software engineering.

Riding the inflection point - Chan Cheow Hoe (~25 mins)

Chan Cheow Hoe is the CTO for GovTech Singapore. In this talk, he talks about what it is like to inherit a large engineering organisation that is not accustomed to delivering at the pace that people expect today, and about the mindsets that helped him. Namely, (1) Adopt a reduction mindset: Reduce complexity, duplication, tech debt, toil; (2) Build accelerators: Products -> Platforms -> Ecosystem; (3) Build competencies: More makers, fewer checkers. More experts, fewer operators. More doers, fewer managers; (4) Automate everything: Reliability -> Repeatability -> Predictability. Early in the talk is the need for scaling (superlinear) compared to what many organisations do instinctively, which is merely growing (linear).

Don't make these hiring mistakes - YC (~20 mins)

Coming from a consulting background, I interpreted this with an alternative title: "Don't make these staffing mistakes". The advice from the YC partners here aligns very much with my own opinions, based on my experience.

The Alternate Reality Kit - Randall Smith (~12 mins)

A delightful demo from PARC, which for me captures a simple essence of OOP.

Seminar on Object-Oriented programming - Alan Kay (~2 hours)

I found this video by chance, thanks to Hemal Varambhia, who shared it on his LinkedIn. It's great.

"The Software Crisis" and data abstraction - Barbara Liskov (~20 mins)

"Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it" etc.

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Created on 2022-06-10

Updated regularly