A 1024 Day Tribute: The Videos I've Chased Over the Years

My last post mentioned a few videos, and a reader messaged me asking whether I could recommend more — something to casually watch when there’s nothing else to do. As it happens, today is 1024 Day, so I’m throwing caution to the wind and rounding up the soul-stirring, high-definition, uncensored videos I’ve watched over the years.

Inventing on Principle (2012)

Bret Victor’s masterpiece. This video hit me on every level at once — he shows how excellent tools can help people think and create. I’ve played parts or all of it on many occasions, and even now, looking back, there is still so much to take away from it. Five stars.

Link: https://vimeo.com/36579366

The future of programming (2013)

Another great work by Bret Victor. Here the guy swims against the current, goes retro, and discusses the future using real “slides.” Whether you look at the content itself or the form of the presentation, it is impeccable. This is a talk that stands on the mountaintop looking down. Five stars.

Link: https://vimeo.com/71278954

Rich Hickey

Rich Hickey is the creator of Clojure, and over the past decade-plus he has contributed a great many classic talks to the community. The reason I list him as a single entry rather than going video by video is that almost every one you can find on YouTube is a gem. A few quick examples:

• Are we there yet? (2009): A talk that contains the seeds of the next two themes (simplicity, value). A wake-up call.
• Simple made easy (2011): The great way is simple. Rich explains the difference between “simple” and “easy” — do one thing and do it well. It’s easy to design a complicated system, but very hard to unravel the threads and design a simple, elegant one.
• the value of values (2012): A talk that wakes you up. Rich likes to start from the origin and fundamental properties of things, and explore what we think we understand but actually don’t. What is a value? How can value and place be decoupled? What do we gain if we can use values everywhere in our code?
• The language of the system (2013): Introduces the concept of the machine, along with transform, move, route, and other delightful functional-programming ideas. If you’re interested in building systems, do not miss this talk.
• Transducers (2014): Ha — transform, map/reduce I’ve heard of, but what the hell is a transducer? For this talk, focus mainly on the thinking that produced the transducer.
• Persistent Data Structures and Managed References (2019): The data structures behind immutability. It comes from Chris Okasaki’s “Purely Functional Data Structures.” Plenty of people have covered this, e.g. Postmodern immutable data structures from CppCon 2017, and the early React author.

All of these are findable on YouTube, so I won’t list links one by one. Transducer gets four stars; the rest get five.

Rich Hickey has influenced my style of giving lectures, and even of writing, to some degree — I too have come to enjoy citing Wikipedia, digging into concepts, and getting down to the origin of a thing.

Joe Armstrong

Old Joe has passed away. Sigh. My motivation to attend Code BEAM dropped by 60%. His video topics tend to be grand in scope; without some deep thinking you’ll probably find your mind wandering. Four stars.

• the mess we’re in (2014): Introduces some interesting history, and discusses name, causality, simultaneity, and entropy.
• The Forgotten Ideas in Computer Science (2018): This one is a bit scattered; feel free to play it at high speed through the parts that don’t interest you.

Forget Velocity, Let’s Talk Acceleration (2017)

My favorite of Jessica Kerr’s videos. The content isn’t all that important; the form in which she presents it is wonderfully novel. Using the iPad’s Paper app, she meticulously constructs an audio-visual feast. Three and a half stars. I really love that kind of expressiveness. At Tubi I used this approach in two or three BBLs. Later I found it a hassle, and inconvenient for technical talks, so I stopped.

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lbcyyu8XB_Y

Railway oriented programming (2014)

Scott Wlaschin is an old hand at F#, with many excellent talks — for instance the Railway oriented programming I mentioned in my last post, which makes the topic of error handling so good it draws cheers. Five stars.

Video link: https://vimeo.com/113707214

Functional Design Patterns (2017)

The same Scott Wlaschin dish. The version I watched was probably the 2014 one; I don’t know what’s been updated in this one. If you like functional programming, or want to understand it, there’s no reason not to watch this. Five stars.

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srQt1NAHYC0

Architecture the Lost Years (2011)

Uncle Bob (Robert Martin) actually has many excellent talks, and this one on architecture is genuinely good — even though, from today’s vantage point, MVC is nothing new. But his exploration of boundaries and his overall conception of architecture are still worth learning from. Four stars. In 2019 he gave Clean Architecture and Design; I haven’t gotten around to watching it, but those interested can take a peek.

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpkDN78P884

The Future of Programming (2016)

Another great work by Uncle Bob. It’s called the future of programming, but it’s really the history of programming, since he barely discusses the future. Still, from the standpoint of “take history as a mirror, and you can know rise and fall,” it’s well worth a look. Four stars.

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecIWPzGEbFc

That’s all for now. Happy holiday, everyone!