Conference Video Recommendations

I love watching conference videos, and certainly find it’s a great way to learn and keep upto-date on a diverse range of topics. In this post I’ll share a few of my favourite talks, and give you links to all the conferences I am aware of.

Normally I pack my tablet full of these talks and watch them during my commute. So you don’t have to find lots of time each week, you could try and make productive use of your journeys to and from work like I do.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions or recommendations… I hope you find this list useful.Software Delivery & Process

Few talks make my commute go quicker than a revealing discussion about how teams are delighting stakeholders and customers with better quality and more frequent releases. Some of my favourite talks include:

Velocity and Volume — Adrian Cockroft explains the necessity for Netflix to constantly out-iterate their competitors and some of the strategies they use for doing so
GE Panel, The Biggest Implementation of Lean Startup on Earth — A case-study of how Eric Ries helped introduce Lean Principles into one of the biggest companies on earth
Deep Kanban. Worth the Investment? — If you want to learn about what Kanban really is and how it continues to evolve, this talk is both educational and engrossing
Mobile Web at Etsy — If you want some tips for building goal-oriented teams with a blameless culture, Lara Swanson gives some truly inspiring stories of her experiences at Etsy in this talk. It is about way more than just mobile

Lara Swanson’s insights into the Etsy culture will help me every single day for the rest of my career

(photo credit: youtube.com)

The Virtuous Cycle of Velocity: What I Learned About Going Fast at eBay and Google by Randy Shoup — Hire smart people and give them freedom to do great things is one of the many interesting insights shared by Randy Shoup in this talk on his experiences at Google and eBay

You may be interested in the following conferences if you would like to find more videos like this:

After a nice big bowl of oats in the morning, I do love watching an enthralling distributed systems talk during my commute. Ricon, especially, is a knowledge-rich source of learning.

Some of my favourite distributed systems talks include:

Realtime Systems for Social Data Analysis — this talk gave me some real eye-openers about how companies are using the vast amounts of data generated online. This talk is by Hilary Mason from bit.ly and I just cannot recommend it enough. It made me realise how modern system architectures need to be heavily influenced by the data they need to capture
Bloom: Big Systems from Small Programs — an inspiring talk by Neil Conway who is working on a programming language for distributed systems that contains native capabilities for expressing concepts like data consistency
Reactive Data Management — I don’t work in the billions-of-transactions per-second finance industry, but this talk was still super-interesting and insightful
CQRS — This is quite an old talk now, but it was my first exposure to distributed systems design considerations about 4 years ago. It certainly taught me to start thinking in different ways

You may be interested in the following conferences if you would like to find more videos like this:

As a Scala developer I get a lot of benefit from keeping upto-date with what’s being said at Scala conferences. A few of the Scala conference talks I recommend are:

Metascala a tiny DIY JVM — An inspiring hobby project: a JVM written in Scala
Crazy Algebra with Scala Types — I always enjoy being reminded how little I know and how limited my intelligence is. This talk by Jon Pretty certainly knocks my ego down a few notches

I know of the following Scala conferences if you would like to find more videos:

Scala eXchange
Flatmap Java / JVM

Nowadays the JVM is my home so I like to do my research and understand my stack. I enjoy watching talks that range from GC tuning strategies to Lambdas in Java (yes it’s 2014 and they’ve finally just arrived).

Here are a few of the talks I have found most interesting and useful related to Java and the JVM:

Understanding Java Garbage Collection and What You Can Do About It — the team at Azul Systems are JVM gurus. This is a fascinating talk about some GC internals
Learn about JVM internals — what does the JVM do? — I watched this talk a while ago and was impressed at the time about how it made low-level concepts quite accessible. I should probably watch it again
Implementing Lambda Expressions in Java — I found this talk so interesting because it was about VM-level design decisions, and I knew very little about this

Here are the Java / JVM conferences that I know of, in-case you’d like to find more videos:

Jax
JVM language summit Infrastructure / Ops / DevOps / Linux

Writing code is only part of the diverse range of activities involved in shipping great products. Choosing the right operating system, configuration management setup, and hosting solution are all critical steps that can have a massive impact upon the success of a project.

Throw in the significance of effective working patterns between Ops and developers and you can understand why I spend a lot of time watching videos on these topics.

Out of many, just a few of the videos I have enjoyed watching over the past year are:

Dockercon Keynote: Solomon Hykes — Watching this talk made me realise that Docker is going to be an even bigger game-changer than I thought. I seriously recommend watching this video

Soloman Hykes did his company proud by communicating the game-changing capabilities coming out of the Docker eco-system

(photo credit: docker.io)

Docker at Spotify — A really insightful presentation of how a fumbling giant finally got their infrastructure under control by using Docker
systemd, beyond init — As a proud Arch Linux user I wanted to get a grasp on systemd. This talk by it’s author was more than I could ask for. Highly recommended

Here are plenty of conferences where you can find hours and hours of infrastructure nerds waffling on about some pretty cool things:

If you can teach me something and make me laugh. Well you’re a pretty special person in my eyes. Here are a few tech videos that I recommend for their intended comedy value:

Hanselman at Velocity — Scott Hanselman is articulate, funny, and very smart. He demonstrates all of those qualities in this funny, yet informative, talk
Darach Ennis — In this talk Darach demonstrates lots of Irish charm and humour whilst crashing his drone and belittling Windows developers

Darach Ennis in poser mode

(photo credit: infoq.com)

6 stages of systemd — funny, but very true. systemd has had a massive polarising effect, even in the company where I work. This talk touches on the reasons why, wrapping them in lots of humour and nerdy gags along the way Other
pycon — python videos
NDC Oslo — .NET centric but some general talks
Lucene Revolution — lots of talks about search
DDD talks @ Skillsmatter — Skillsmatter have lots of Domain Driven Design content for you to watch (please hassle them to enable downloading) On My List

Here are some conferences that I’ll soon be cramming on to my tablet. If you know any more or have any recommendations for me, I would really appreciate it.