Some great productivity tools for your own endeavours. More importantly, some real talk about the mental cost that work takes on you. Some real insights into trying to have steady progress. Not huge burst followed by mental breakdowns.
Technically, it's an excellent talk about systems engineering. That is, looking broadly at systems, how you can significantly simplify and reduce the problem if you're willing to forgo interfaces. With that broad theme in mind, the actual talk ends up being a whirlwind tour through a lot of the VR headset and video/image technologies John was working on at the time. Excellent technical talk as always.
Lightning fast set of tips for animation. Fantastic wealth of knowledge. So many things that just about every animation, let alone game, could learn something from to make a quick pass of and improve with.
Learn third person dynamic game camera design strategies from one of the best. What's not to love! This is one of those talks where you can feel every single mistake as something they personally made and had to go back and fix. Listening I felt almost like I was right there with them when they realized it wouldn't work. Great talk format. I also love that the very first mistake they talk about is even choosing to do a dynamic third person camera. Basically, here be dragons.
If you're unfamiliar with narrative analysis, this talk does a decent job giving you a good intro to the concept of analyzing stories to understand their parts analytically.
They then point out that the story doesn't really matter. Did it ever matter? They even start by pointing out every story structure ever becomes hard to fully map. The one structure that seems to map to every story is that it had a beginning, middle, and end. Duh! You can add a bunch of beats or points, but as you do, you find more and more stories that don't fit that given structure or you find yourself picking more and more obscure elements to stand in for the given beats.
Either way, they then point out that in games, people care about the characters and their growth more than the story. But I'd argue good stories have always focused on characters. It's one of the biggest things between great stories and bad ones. Bad ones end up just being a series of tropes. Things to expect in a narrative because they work, not because they matter. Great stories usually revolve around something deeper. Not like a lesson, more like a truth. Something deep and real to connect to, even in settings and stories that are fantastic or impossible. It's always the characters that ground them. How people interact and relate to the narrative.
Just do that, but for video games. Chasing the structure really doesn't matter. Case in point, The Before Trillogy are excellent movies with very little plot, and yet it's the extremely deep and personal characterization that makes them so compelling. You truely get to know and understand these people, warts and all.
Now just apply that to games. It works extremely well in all sorts of games from linear narratives to open world. You get to understand how the character navigates the world, the situations, the experiences. What makes their point of view unique. What makes their actions matter. We relate to them on this deeply human level. The story is not the focus of a narrative, it's only there as a vehicle to allow the characters to show us who they are and how they grow and change. That growth is what's satisfying. The story is only a tool to help achieve it.
I could go on, but it's a great piece to critique both video game narratives but also the role of structure in stories all together. Sort of an emperor's new cloths talk if you reflect on it beyond the context it's presented in. If structure doesn't matter to video games, why does it matter elsewhere? Could it be the medium is the message and the only reason for a beginning, middle, and end is that books, movies, and TV shows as a medium have to have this structure? That stories in them must therefore also have this structure, and that games don't have to have such a structure has opened a whole world of narrative far beyond what these other more limited mediums can achieve?
Just some Dr. Seuss style poetry about programming. Love it! The content's meh, but the form is wonderful.
https://vimeo.com/video/95066828
First of all, more people need talks like this. James Mickens has a style of beautiful satire blended with insightful critique. A format in significant lack among conference talks and one I can really suggest more people try and emulate. This was actually one of the first talks I saw from him. Well worth the watch.
As for the technical insights, essentially a great introduction to, "Don't do microservices if you can help it." Glad we all learned our lesson in 2014 and didn't… Oh… Oh no…
Just give the talk a little bit. It's fantastic but the opening is a bit slow.
An excellent talk. In the intervening time I think we've got some more nuance with languages like Python, Go, and JavaScript. How it's not the size of the language but the size of the standard and third party libraries. The ecosystem of code you can call into instead of having to write yourself. Lots of well tested code that just works out of the box. That's the thing that makes languages attractive. Essentially how little engineering you have to do relative to the business venture (or just project scope) you can pursue.
Everyone would due well to learn all this. Like, I talk to friends all the time who don't consider themselves programmers. I have a few who really know how to create and use spreadsheets. One lost their job due to office politics and they were out of a job for like a week.
Spreadsheets are, in my opinion, the closest we ever came as an industry to end user computing. We gave up because you make billions more if you sell them subscriptions to tools that do only what you let them while pretending they're better than a general purpose computer. It's one of the real shames of the industry if you ask me. We were so close.
I think LLMs may potentially unlock end user computing again, mostly by accident. I've been hearing about all sorts of non-technical people creating their own software tools again finally. Like a guy's dad who created his own browser plugin for a thing he wanted. It's such an ugly way to get them to really use a computer to compute, but at least we're moving in the right direction again.
Finally, if you're going to create an Excel clone (hence why this was filmed at Google) you're going to want to pay close attention to this. This is what real Excel users expect your application to do. Not things they should have alternatives to if they learn how to use your thing. No, this is all just very basic, expected functionality. Notice how over 99% of everything talked about here works exactly like this on Google Sheets? Yeah.
At some point, I realized, without knowing it up until that point, that I was 3 weeks from an operating system. Luckily right at that moment, my wife went on a 3 week vacation to take my one year old (roughly) to visit my in-laws, who were in California. Disappeared. All alone. And one week, one week, one week and we had Unix.
Absolute Legend.
Super cool insights into the biological world. A great look into some of what's been happening in biology research and how computation intersects. Where computer scientists can team up with biologists to help improve our understanding and thus our ability to improve medicine.
I also always appreciate when biologists bust the myth that you're some kind of brain in a jar. That your brain is the important thing making decisions and the rest of your body is a skin suit for it to enact it's control of the world. That's not how any of this works. Not even close. I hope the insights he is able to share and the experiments we have from the biological world help you see how complex and interconnected every single part of your body is. You're whole body is thinking, not just your brain, in ways we still really don't understand.
This is less practical, more historical. I always say learning your history is really important. It helps you understand why things are the way they are. To that end, this talk isn't that great at building a picture to understand how we got here, however, there are a number of interesting things to learn about how filesystems have evolved in the BSDs.
I'd say, if you have the time and want to, it's a decent talk. If you're on the fence about what to spend your time listening to, maybe pick a different talk.
A couple great old topics in the history of games and graphics rendering (still relevant in ways today).
Always great to see talks that come with data. Still loaded with opinions, but the data helps create an informed discussion.
Takeaways are use 2FA, use a password manager, more software means more risk, security updates are critical but too many updates aren't about security, instead more often adding attack surface and sometimes supply chain attacks.
Ignore their sales pitch about moving everything to the clown. Turns out the clown vendor thinks you really need a clown.
This is probably one of the most important talks I can share with you. Understanding how to squeeze the software is how the next generation of winners and loosers will be defined in a post-Moore's law environment. Hardware gains are no longer coming to save you. The ability to create software that's faster than your competitor will feel snappier and more responsive to customers and provide significant incentives to switch.
Great talk about git beyond the basics. Not just a series of pointless disconnected features that almost nobody uses (our should use) like notes, worktree, or instaweb. Instead, it's a sort of normal day in the office with Lorna where you get to see a lot of the nuts and bolts in action through a series of fairly common tasks and events. Then you learn haw you can handle those all better with some better understanding of the internals and smarter tooling available.
Some really great insights into a whole lot of elevator details. Also, a whole lot of fun. This talk is so long, but sooooo good!
Gotta say, sweet shout out to SimTower. I loved that game when I was a kid. Not really in my list of suggested games these days, but still a fun play if you're into something old school to chill through a weekend with.
Some history of programming languages. Mostly how ALGOL is the language your favourite language is based off of. Also how it's not C like many people think, because C was based off of B and B was based off of ALGOL.
I love the, "Go was invented in the 1970s." To that I say, yes! That's largely why I love it.
In all seriousness, one thing that continues to bug me is people essentially abusing return statements to get rid of else blocks. This advice has even seeped its way into many static analysis tools. It frustrates me constantly and I'm sure you'll also start being bugged by it once you understand how it subverts the program structure. It's like kerning, once you know about it you'll notice it everywhere.
Overall, a great talk to understand and truly appreciate what procedural programming is, not what some people claim it is. To understand how it fits in with other concepts and why it makes sense for a good number of problems as one of the right tools for a solution.
If you like this talk, go read How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery by Kevin Ashton. This is probably one of the best talks on how to be more creative, offering practical steps. It explains how you can create brand new things. Fantastic talk! It's true that it's focused on creating new games, but the tools and methods discussed aren't confined to that. That's just the case study. I highly recommend practicing these methods because very few people actually understand them. Instead, they spout words like "innovation" and "engagement" when they're panicked, hoping someone else understands how to be creative.
Some great papers picked out from the history of language design and abstraction. Probably some stuff you already know, but other stuff that's new, and all with a passing discussion of the details. Beyond that, a number of small details about our history in software development more from someone actually working on these things at the time instead of a third or fourth hand history. Finally, a look at some of Liskov's work and the things she was working on, including the famous Liskov Substitution principal, though she points out it was mostly an offhand remark she'd made more than something big she came up with.
Unfortunately we don't get her slides so the details that are being presented to the audience are often missing. You'll have to pay close attention to what she's saying when she's discussing concepts to try and really visualize what she's describing in these designs and notations. There's a couple really neat ideas she discusses that could potentially help language authors help developers express more clearly (and ideally error free) the solutions they're programming.
An excellent talk about the concept of understanding everything in computing, opening black boxes if you will. It's probably one of, if not the reason I'm even in this field. There's just so much you can learn. So much you can understand about everything we've built. Not only that, but the talk is also a great deep dive into some great graphics concepts. Although he says only some people should learn these things, I disagree. Why not learn how everything works? You could know everything if you put your mind to it. It just takes time and building up the right prerequisite understanding to stand on the shoulders of giants instead of standing on their toes. So spend the time. The journey of knowledge is incredible and the heights are unimaginable (the money's not bad either).