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Where can I find great/new programming tech talks?

38 points by swaraj ↗ HN
I'm a 4th year CS major about to graduate in May, but not starting work till July. I'm really interested in soaking up as much CS knowledge/experience during these few months so I can try to bring myself up to speed with the 'latest and greatest' in industry. Here are some examples of talks/videos I've watched recently that I found interesting and would love to find videos similar to:

* Arista's EOS: http://www.aristanetworks.com/en/products/eos

* Palantir White Videos: http://www.palantirtech.com/government/videos/whitevideos

* Scala at Twitter: http://ontwik.com/scala/scaling-scala-at-twitter-by-marius-eriksen/

Thanks

21 comments

[ 66.1 ms ] story [ 527 ms ] thread
brianwillis
Talks at conferences tend to be as much about entertainment as education. Let's be honest, there's only so far you can go with a subject within the confines of a one hour speech. So if you're looking to "soak up as much CS knowledge/experience" as you can, try reading some of the classics of CS literature.

Jeff Atwood's list of recommended reading is a good place to start: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/02/recommended-reading...

This discussion on Stack Overflow also has some good entries in it: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single-m...

swaraj
That's a good point, but as I was looking over some of the chapters of the highest-rated books, they seemed to be teaching mostly high-level, abstract concepts and ideas without discussing specific technologies or tools. I don't want to come off as naive for dismissing books like these, but a significant part of my CS education in college has used some of these textbooks and I wanted to learn more about specific technologies and services.

I feel most inadequate reading about how start-ups are using actual new technologies like AWS or Couchbase. It seems as if tech talks often provide a good overview of the applications and constraints of new technologies. So given the fact that I do not really have any idea what specific projects I will be working on in the future, I feel that having at least a general overview of what tools are available will prove to be useful.

num1
This is one of the biggest challenges with teaching programming, everything changes incredibly quickly. If you want to write a book that people will recommend for decades, or even for years, you need to gloss over any specific technology and only talk about the concepts that will not change for quite a while.

With that said, InfoQ.com has a lot of videos that sound like what you're looking for.

DanWaterworth
googletechtalks on youtube.
runevault
This and infoq seem to have a lot of the most useful videos that are not just randomly out there (people posting a few videos they made themselves or the like).
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esschul
parleys.com has a decent amount of videos, focusing mainly on java.
nickmalcolm
Webstock has all of its conference talks online. 2011 (http://www.webstock.org.nz/talks/events/webstock-11/) has some awesome talks (I went, I should know :P ), and I suggest watching them all.

Speakers include Marco Arment, Doug Bowman, Josh Clark, Merlin Mann, John Gruber, Jason Cohen... so many amazing speakers. (Skip Mark Pilgrim though.)