Technical reading

Compiled Aug 19, 2020

If you like what I've collected here, I write a lot on my blog and sometimes it's about tech, too.

Technical conference talks

These are just pulled from a private YouTube playlist I have.

The Journey of CodeSandbox, Ives van Hoorne - @compuives explains the journey to building CodeSandbox. Fun talk, interesting to see how everything works.
React component patterns, Michael Chan - this sounds mega boring but is actually one of the best React talks of this length I've seen, explaining ways to do composition in easy-to-understand diagrams
Advanced design system considerations, Alex Sexton - if you're a design systems junkie, you'll like this. I consider myself a frontend veteran and learned a lot from this talk.
The Future of the Web, Lee Byron - a grandiose title for a talk with good high-level ideas about what programming on the Web has looked like, ans where we're going. Leads into React and its origin story.

Implementing a BigNum calculator, Rob Pike - writing an APL-style calculator interpreter in Go, some interesting design decisions and demos.
Getting something for nothing, James Munns - a good talk about Rust's "zero-cost abstractions" concept
State of the creates.io, Sean Graffin - a good, well-written behind-the-scenes look at running Rust's package repository, and how Rust shines in performance/efficiency
Compacting the uncompactable, Bobby Powers - more niche talk about a novel design for a compacting memory allocator, which is cool
What has my compiler done for me lately?, Matt Godbolt - just a very good talk about what kinds of optimizations and transformations smart compilers can make in 2020, given by the creator of Compiler Explorer
The strange details of std::string at Facebook, Nicholas Ormrod - a deep-dive into the kind of reserach/work that goes into a high performance impleentation of a common abstraction, the C++ std::string

Oral traditions in Software Engineering, Bryan Cantrill - one of my all-time favorite technical talks, about oral traditions in Silicon Valley of vintage -- in the first wave of silicon and computer companies.
Small is Beautiful, Kevlin Henney - high level talk from one of my favorite speakers about software architecture and design. Funny, educational, well-written talk.
Inventing on Principle, Bret Victor - classic talk, universally recommended for its fantastic demos and cohesive ideas about how to choose what to work on, and how much better creative tools can be.

Selected from a Pocket list of articles I read and saved

Things I wish more devs knew about databases -- written by @rakyll, a big Go community member
How Go's scheduler deals with system calls
Pointer compression in V8 -- how Chrome reduces memory usage for JS objects
Regular Expression Matching can be Simple and Fast, Russ Cox - Russ Cox's blog has a lot of gems about RegExps but this is my favorite, a breakdown of how RegExp matchers work, and what a modern implementation looks like

Speculation in JavaScriptCore - JSC is Safari's JavaScript engine; the blog explores how speculative optimization helps JSC be faster, in a clear deep dive into its internals
Introducing SquirrelFish Extreme - one of the best blog posts I've read about a JS engine. Deep dive into WebKit/Safari's fully optimizing JS compiler, SquirrelFish Extreme, and the optimizations/abstractions that make it fast.
The hardest program I've ever written, Bob Nystrom - post about writing dartfmt, the Dart language code formatter. It's a really good deep dive into (1) how to approach a hairy engineering problem, and (2) why code formatting is so damn hard
Firefox's low-latency (first pass) WebAssembly compiler
The CPython compiler is dumb
Rust's runtime
Sol, a small virtual machine
Lua's bytecode optimizations
Kalyn, a lisp/haskell-like programming language. This is written by Radon, who worked with me at Repl.it in Summer 2019
Why the Sorbet type checker (for Ruby, from Stripe) is fast
Moving the Go 1.3 compiler from C to Go
Making the Tokio scheduler (from Rust async) 10x faster
Inside the Go Playground (from 2010)

Deciphering the Postcard-sized pathtracer - good breakdown of a really interesting, really tiny raytracing program, going into how it works, and how it can be so small