6 Conference Talks to Level Up as a Developer

Conference talks are a great way to learn from other developers - writing one requires distilling hours of preparation, and the distilliation of potentially years of experience into an hour presentation. If you can find good conferences, you will hear many perspectives on up-and-coming tools, while learning from seasoned veterans.

Over the last year, I've been building a search engine for lectures, which includes thousands of software conference talks. Here are some of the best:

Web Design: The First Hundred Years with Maciej Ceglowski

Maciej Cegłowski's talks blend history, software development, and humor. In this talk he draws lessons on software privacy from the rich history of U.S. / Soviet competition in the development of the aerospace industry.

Rails Conf 2013 How to Talk to Developers by Ben Orenstein

In this talk, Ben Orenstein demonstrates techniques to level up your presenting skills and make your talks memorable, using a creative series of lightning talks.

Google Driverless Cars

Autonomous vehicles are in the news a lot lately. This talk covers the history of the research, some basic mechanics of how they work, and what the future holds.

DEF CON 18 - Barnaby Jack - Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines Redux

Security is a big focus within the software industry, and will only become more important as awareness of security issues grow. In this talk, the presenter shows how he hacked specific model of ATM to spit out money, following the process from what he went through to purchase the ATM to developing and deploying software on a device that is hardened by design.

Alan Kay, 2015: Power of Simplicity

Alan Kay is one of the great figures in computer science - in this keynote talk, he shares his experiences from a career in software development.

Unconscious Bias @ Work | Google Ventures

This is a training video from a team at Google, on how to avoid allowing unconscious bias to affect HR decisions (hiring and performance reviews). While this is geared around preventing discrimination against women, it is intended to be generalized. The strength of this material is that the speaker covers a series of interesting recent psychological experiments, as well as data from Google and specific actions that they have taken to avoid unfair hiring practices.

Know something I've missed? Please send me your favorites!