3 HN users recommended this talk3 months2015–2022score 3.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN lists it among its favorite programming talks and fantastic technical speeches.
Tef's EMF 2012 talk on lessons from a career in programming, a candid and humorous look at why programming is so often terrible. Slides and a draft script are available online.
That and Hammock Driven Development: [link] Both of these talks are in my top 5. Edit (okay, here are the other 3): * All the Little Things by Sandi Metz [link] * Programming is terrible—Lessons learned from a life wasted. [this video] * Some talk I saw by Dan McKinley on making Data-Driven decisions. I can't find the original video, but here's a really similar one: [link]
1) Do not attempt to live code. change your code via version control, build small videos, copy and paste... whatever you do... do not try and live code 2) Read "The presentation secrets of Steve Jobs" ... its not really about Steve Jobs so much as its about how to be a great presenter. 3) building or writing a talk is significantly less important than the delivery... which means that more of your time should be spent on how to deliver the speech (recording I find is the best way to practice) 4) Pick a single thing and do it well, do not attempt to put too much into a talk or tackle something massively complex. 5) Make sure that everyone is walking away with something they can actually use. This doesn't require it be a hard skill... "Soft" or philosophical utilities are just as good 6) Have Fun and be funny... Speakers have a tendency to want to show off the size of their intellect, and the level their competency- having a speech be entertaining is way way more important. 7) DO NOT READ FROM YOUR SLIDES. know your shit. slides are supplementary Extra Credit. Here's a collection of some fantastic technical speeches: * [link] * [link] * [link] * [this video] * [link] * [link]
Rich Hickey - Hammock-driven development: [link] Brett Victor - Inventing on principle: [link] Programming is terrible: [this video] Dave Beazely - Python concurrency from the ground up (applicable to languages in general, with generator and corourine functionality) [link] Functional programming, with birds: [link] Short and classic: Wat [link]
I don't mean to troll, but having ideas is nothing. Of course projects start with ideas but if the creator of the idea didn't pursue given concept - neither should you. [this video]
I think it's a rehash (conscious or not) of Thomas Figg's famous "Webapps, or as I like to call them: Skins around databases." -joke that he used in his "Programming is terrible—Lessons learned from a life wasted" talk from many years ago. It's no longer completely true, but honestly it's still kind of true. And I've been making my living writing them for years now ;) [0] [this video]
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
6 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more
Citations, criticism and jokes