Mat Ryer created this fun Go Time promo at JavaScript’s expense. Should Johnny use Go or TypeScript? 😉

This video from Kevin Hale (YC Partner) is in my “watch later” list on YouTube. Add it to your list too if you desire to build successful working relationships with your cofounders.

The video of Feross’s talk “What I Learned from WebTorrent” from the Data Terra Nemo conference was just released.

In the talk, Feross shares behind-the-scenes details about how WebTorrent was built, he reflects on hard-won lessons, and shares advice for other projects in the P2P and decentralized web space.

JS Party listeners will find a familiar guest voice on this episode from the Google Webmasters channel.

Starring Lee Byron, Dan Schafer and Nick Schrock (co-creators of GraphQL) and other big names from the community [the documentary] explores the story of why and how GraphQL came to be and the impact it’s having on big tech companies worldwide.

Michael Malis at !!Con 2019:

Writing SQL can be hard. SQL code is a bizarre combination of yelling and relational algebra. How can we make writing SQL easier? By embedding our own programming language in our SQL queries of course! In this talk, we’ll take a look at how you use a combination of various Postgres features to build a programming language out of SQL.

Nick Janetakis (whose voice you recently heard on Backstage #4) walks through 3 different open source code bases, including ours. This is a somewhat lengthy video (37:13), but Nick has nicely timestamped it out in the first YouTube comment. 👍

On Practical AI #41, Adam Berenzweig gave a sweeping history of human-computer interaction (HCI) and a glimpse into what the future might hold.

Just wow. Quixel has just showed us what the future of video games could look like.

Introducing Rebirth, a real-time cinematic produced by Quixel, harnessing the power of Unreal Engine and real-world scans from the Megascans Icelandic collection. With photorealistic results rivaling traditional offline renderers, Rebirth represents a new way of crafting computer graphics.

4 minutes and 8 seconds of pure entertainment. If you watch this and don’t bust a gut, I’m sorry to report that you have no soul. 😆 (h/t Mathieu Isabel who shared this in response to our viral tweet from yesterday)

JS Party panelist, Feross Aboukhadijeh:

In the days of Geocities and Angelfire, a quirky HTML tag called ⟨bgsound⟩ enabled sound files to play in the background of webpages. Usually, these files were in the MIDI format. What a glorious era that was! Sadly, ⟨bgsound⟩ has been removed from browsers and MIDI is obscure and hard to play back. In this talk, we’ll bring MIDI and ⟨bgsound⟩ back from the dead using WebAssembly, Emscripten, Web Audio, and Web Components. When we’re finished, you’ll be able to give your webpages the 90’s treatment in a modern, standards-compliant way!

This is slightly off-topic from my usual loggings, but it’s just so freakin’ hacker that I had to share it with you. He calls himself, Hand Solo. Watch to the end to see him playing electronic music with his nubbin’. 🤯

This is a short 15 minute talk from Henry Zhu at All Things Open, who just announced their photos and videos from their 2018 conference. In this talk Henry asks:

When we think about open source, we think about code. Is it more than that?

What do you think? What is open source to you?

HaskellRank is a YouTube series where we solve a couple of simple programming problems but in Haskell. It’s an on-going experiment where I’m trying to teach Haskell through constalty showing different examples instead of giving a well structured material.

Queue this up for your long holiday weekend. Hack the planet!!!

I heard about this video while listening to this week’s episode of Practical AI*. The video also cover the best desktop system, best DIY system, and best cloud options.

*(We’re testing out a tick-tock model for that show where it alternates between an interview style and a ‘news/resources’ style. Let us know if you like it)

We talk about Imposter Syndrome a lot around these parts, but a related phenomenon that gets less attention is a cognitive bias in which people with lesser abilities tend to rate themselves as more proficient than they are.

Node is a massive success, but that doesn’t mean Ryan doesn’t regret decisions he (and others) made along the way. This talk is super candid and refreshing. During the last 10 minutes or so, he reveals he’s been working on a follow-up project (Deno, which I logged last week) that aims to wipe those regrets away.

If you haven’t yet, you should watch this. It’s 8 minutes long and packed with insights from Sataya himself on why Microsoft bought GitHub.

We are all in on open source and that’s what really brings us together with GitHub — and we’re going to operate as an open platform for any language, any framework, whether it’s the cloud or on the client.

Nat Friedman, who’s going to be the CEO of GitHub post close, came to Microsoft from Xamarin — he’s someone who’s a veteran of open source and he’s going to lead the company.

We’re going to operate GitHub as an open platform, and most developers are going to judge us by our recent actions and our actions going forward — and we will have to earn the trust everyday. We’re very committed to it.

At the core, Microsoft is a developer tools company. This is something that comes very natural to us. Earning the trust of our customers by our actions everyday is what we live by.

The most important thing is that it’s not just about Azure. We welcome every cloud provider to integrate with GitHub in order to be able to reach the GitHub community — and give GitHub members a choice of any cloud, as well as any client, mobile platform, or IoT platform.

I’m relatively familiar with Machine Learning at this point, but I had never heard of Reinforcement Learning until I watched this excellent talk by Kaleo Ha’o at ML4ALL.

I knew it was going to be good as soon as he laid out this comparison: if Machine Learning is teaching computers by example, then Reinforcement Learning is teaching computers by experience. Fascinating stuff!

Matt Jaffe was on a recent episode of Go Time and also gave this talk at OSCON recently on indexes as a first class citizen. In this video Matt talks about a piece of software that’s purely an index, not a database, not a datastore, just the index — and optimizing that single piece of software to be very fast!

Here’s a quick breakdown of an index as a first class citizen:

• Standalone application, not just a data structure
• Horizontally scalable, distributed
• FAST, indexes should make things faster
• Flexible, integrates with other datastores and data types

Also, learn more about Pilosa to see Matt’s work in action.

Steve Jobs, in his last interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the All Things Digital’s D8 Conference in 2010. Steve died a year later.

We’re organized like a start up. We’re the biggest startup on the planet. There’s tremendous teamwork at the top of the company, which filters down to tremendous teamwork throughout the company. Teamwork is dependent on trusting the other folks to come through with their part without watching them all the time, but trusting they’re going to come through with their parts. That’s what we do really well.

If you wanna hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to be run by ideas not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay.

This interview has many great highlights, but this part is some of my favorite advice Steve has ever given about how to run a company. We strive to achieve this at Changelog.

Here’s a link to the full video, and the same but deep linked to the part quoted in this post.

On the heels of DHH’s On Writing Software Well, Jason Fried has launched a similar project focusing on design. The first episode features Jason reviewing two versions (old and new) for inviting people to a Basecamp project.

Both series are also being published on a Getting Real YouTube channel.

Follow along with DHH as he explores the Basecamp 3 codebase to uncover areas of the code that can be improved one way or another. This is as close as it gets to pair programming with David as he examines the code and ways he might improve it.

What a gem. When Letterman asks her how she knew so much about computers back then, Grace quips:

I didn’t, it was the first one!

(Thanks to mcdado for sharing this in our community Slack.)