Useful Talks/Talks I've enjoyed

Reviving a computer system of 25 years ago - Wirth, 2014 [youtube]

I have a soft spot for Niklaus Wirth as he created the Pascal programming language (and many others) which was the first proper language I learnt (I don't really count BASIC).

As such this is a fascinating overview of his work for the last 25 years going into Project Oberon and the current project to run it on an FPGA (I'm resisting the urge to buy one).

If you are interested in the path not taken for computer/OS development it is worth checking out Project Oberon (New Edition) book and material

The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Englebart - 1968 [youtube]

It's hard to describe the sheer brilliance of the talk/demonstration, in 100 minutes Douglas Englebartdemonstrates the next 50 years of computing.

Imagine you go to a conference and a speaker demonstrates a hand portable quantum supercomputer with a neural interface.

In 1968, he demonstrated keyboard, mouse input, interaction with graphics, shared remote editing of the same document (something that still fails too often now), interaction with online databases, interactive hierarchical documentation, compilers, hypertext and document description language (something like postscript).

It's difficult to summarise this talk, it'd be too long, We are still using much of the technology and that to me makes it forever amazing.

Programming is terrible—Lessons learned from a life wasted. [youtube]

One of the funniest talks I've ever seen on programming, done “tongue very much in cheek” but he covers a lot of things related to the industry of producing software - the bit on Waterfall is painful but very funny.

A Philosophy of Software Design [youtube]

An excellent talk by John Ousterhout covering material in his book "A Philosophy of Software Design" which I reviewed here