An excellent talk about the importance of simplicity in the language which is anything but:
Category Archives: Internets of interest
Internets of Interest #4: Niall Murphy’s Polemic Against On-Call
The interaction between career development and on-call is actually really, really, bad. Bluntly, the profession takes on-call seriously, tries to be good at it, yet it is very very rare for this to be rewarded in any meaningful way. In 11 years at my previous employer, I never saw anyone get promoted for on-call performance.
Not once.
Internets of interest #3: Adam Fletcher on Life of an Airline Flight
One of my favourite talks from the elusive Systems We Love conference series.
Videos: https://systemswe.love/videos
Internets of interest #2: John Ousterhout discusses a Philosophy of Software Design
Ousterhout’s opus is tearing up tech twitter at the moment. But for those outside the North American prime shipping service area, we’re shit out of luck until a digital version is available. Until then, here’s Ousterhout’s Google Tech talk:
Slides: https://platformlab.stanford.edu/Seminar%20Talks/retreat-2017/John%20Ousterhout.pdf
CS190: https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/cs190-winter18/index.php
Internets of interest #1: Brian Kernighan on the Elements of Programming Style
“It turns out that style matters in programming for the same reason that it matters in writing. It makes for better reading.”
Douglas Crockford
I stumbled across this old (in internet years) presentation a few weeks ago and it’s been on high rotation since. If you can look past the recording difficulties (and the evacuation siren) this presentation is chock full of sound advice applicable to all programmers.
Internets of interest #0: The future of Microprocessors
This weekend I’ve been freshening up the introductory material for a workshop that Francesc Campoy and I are teaching at GopherCon this month. As part of my research, these videos have been on high rotation.
The first video by Sophie Wilson, the designer of the first ARM chip from which both the company and the line of RISC microprocessors we know today were born.
The second presentation by John Hennessy of Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach fame is a reprisal of the 2017 Turing Award lecture he gave with his co-author David Patterson.
The theme of both presentations is the same; the end of Dennard scaling and the tremendous technical and economic challenges in bringing extreme UV lithography to the commercial processor production will cap the growth in processor performance to 2-3% per year for the foreseeable future.
Both Wilson and Hennessy see the future of processor design as a gestalt of CPUs, GPUs, DSPs and VLIW architectures. Issue of adapting mainstream imperative programming languages to these architectures remains very much an open question.