Best Talks of 2020?

For me, it was Art of Code by Dylan Beattie, but mostly because that talk has the best ending[0] I have seen. Also, introduced to me a side of programming that I instinctively knew existed but never sought out.

[0]: https://youtu.be/6avJHaC3C2U?t=3366

Jeremy Howard's "I Like Notebooks" JupyterCon 2020 Talk

Howard makes the case for why even "real" programmers should give notebook environments a chance. In addition to supporting literate programming ("code as literature") and exploratory programming ("code as scientific notebook") in a live coding environment, Howard explains how notebooks can improve documentation, learning and sharing, testing, and deployment. And add-ins and tools, like Howard's own nbdev, can help address what's missing in Jupyter Notebook. As an example, Howard notes how fastdoc even enabled him to write and publish "Deep Learning for Coders with Fastai and PyTorch: AI Applications Without a PhD using Jupyter Notebooks." Excellent, inspiring talk!

Jeremy Howard - Creating delightful libraries and books with nbdev and fastdoc | JupyterCon 2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKt19-GsA1I

I am not sure if this qualifies, but I found the discussion between Scott Hanselman and Dr. David Kellermann on "Effective Remote Teaching with intention and creativity" fascinating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LaTamAIinc

They mix a number of fairly simple technologies to achieve some really cool new ways to teach remotely.

Also, Scott Hanselman makes a series of well-made videos on "Computer Stuff They Didn't Teach You". His presentation style is down-to-earth, low tech and surprisingly relatable. Check it out!

Paul Stamets, a legendagry mycologist and founder (A Scientist and entrepreneur that successfully founded a mushroom company that grew and grew and grew ). This talk is on psychedelic use, but there are multiple other sub-topic talks by him. Always a joy to hear about his new discoveries in mushrooms and an inspiration regardless of what you do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT-qQWOf98Y

You should check out all his talks if you like this one.

If you are pressed for time, check out his shorter TED prsentations (not necessarily 2020)

2020 is not over, rC3 (https://rc3.world/ https://media.ccc.de/c/rc3) starts on the 27 ;)

Not sure if this fits the bill, but:

How To Speak by Patrick Winston [1]

I watched this 'talk' on 'how to give talks' last week. It was uploaded at the end of 2019 and recorded 2018 (Patrick Winston passed away in 2019) and it is really good. Anyone who gives talks can learn a few things from this.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Unzc731iCUY

For me, it was the USENIX Security talk on intimate partner surveillance (https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity20/presentat...), which introduced me to the field of intimate partner violence (which is typically outside normal threat models) and the crypto keynote on crypto for the people (https://youtu.be/Ygq9ci0GFhA) which similarly introduced me to threats that I hadn't thought about before.

I don't want anything to do with cryptocurrencies but listening to the founder of Ethereum on the Lex Fridman podcast was fascinating.

The way that guy thinks is just impressive.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3x1b_S6Qp2Q

Minor personal confession, and a minor shameless plug.

I really enjoyed the Online Lisp Meeting talks[0] that have happened throughout this year. They show a lot of amazing and recent developments that have been occurring in various parts of the worldwide Lisp landscape, despite how much energy seems to go into repeatedly proclaiming the Lisp family of languages dead, over and over and over.

It was a good choice to host these talks regularly after this year's European Lisp Symposium. I'm glad that I did the work related to that, and I'll be glad to do more of this.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgq_B39Y_kKD9_sdCeE5S...

(Disclosure: two of the talks there are by me; my above comment, naturally, doesn't refer to them.)

I really enjoyed the talk on Linux kernel memory management from Chris Down that was held during this years Arch Conf. It's well structured, funny, and gives nice insight into how you scale when you can't throw more hardware on the problem.

https://media.ccc.de/v/arch-conf-online-2020-6390-linux-memo...

Disclaimer: I helped organize the conference.

I really enjoyed the RustConf 2020 Closing Keynote: https://youtu.be/RNsEsZbXE-4

It details how the Poikemon missingo glitches work. (In the context of how memory safe languages would prevent them)

I don't know, I haven't watched most of them! But the best one I did watch this year was Alexis King's 'Effects for Less' (Haskell).

https://youtube.com/watch?v=0jI-AlWEwYI

I Pressed ⌘B. You Wouldn't Believe What Happened Next - Marcin Wichary, Figma (Config) YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVD-sjtFoEI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE

I personally really enjoyed “HTTP Desync Attacks: Request Smuggling Reborn”[1]

This was technically very late 2019 but I didn’t see it in the previous 2019 thread.

[1] https://youtu.be/_A04msdplXs

"Recoil: State Management for Today's React - Dave McCabe aka @mcc_abe at @ReactEurope"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ISAA_Jt9kI

Disclaimer: I co-organize the conference

I've heard a few good ones, especially for junior devs:

1.David Guttman: How to Get a Better Job Without Learning Another Framework: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voep4CX5lEE&t=3s&ab_channel=...

2. Junior to Senior Podcast w/ Eric Gradman: https://juniortosenior.io/7

Consciousness is Not a Computation (Roger Penrose) | AI Podcast Clips https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hXgqik6HXc0

Full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orMtwOz6Db0

I don't take Roger's view about consciousness for granted but it is very interesting nevertheless.

Some recency bias but I was blown away by the RFC talk for adding server components to React by Dan Abramov and Lauren Tan:

https://reactjs.org/blog/2020/12/21/data-fetching-with-react...

All Day DevOps happened online this year, all the talks are here: https://content.sonatype.com/2020addo

Maybe I'm weird, but I really like talks like Outcomes over Outputs (https://content.sonatype.com/2020addo-ct/addo2020-ct-rangana...). Basically: are the metrics you're tracking helping the business, or just your team? (Also I thought this one was well composed and presented!)

Ok, it wasnt technically this year but I have to share this one just incase anyone missed it, because it's quite possible the best conference talk I've ever seen.

https://youtu.be/r-A78RgMhZU

Not a talk per se, but a great conversation between Brian Greene and Leonard Susskind about the state of modern physics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk48z8N-sl0 .

F# is a better python.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QnbV6CAWXc

Prof. Michael Levin's work, e.g. "Endogenous Bioelectric Networks & Regenerative Medicine" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKWyB9qLP_s

Let's figure out how to regenerate limbs and organs, eh?

I personally enjoyed Halvarflake's 2020 OffensiveCon keynote: "Why I Love Offensive Work, Why I don't Love Offensive Work"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QRnOpjmneo

My favorite talk this year was Snapchat Keynote primarily because of how they produced it given it was totally virtual but gave a feeling of being at a big event : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfvubHha69k

Btw, I run this newsletter if you are interested in becoming a better technical presenter etc - breakdown great talks by tech speakers etc: http://tinyletter.com/suyash

https://db.cs.cmu.edu/seminar2020/

Not tech, but economics: Mark Carney, who is the former governor of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada, is the BBCs Reith lecturer this year[1]. Plenty of interesting points, questions and topical discussion in the series.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000py8t

Basically anything by Prof. Chelsea Finn for the sole reason that they represent the cutting edge thinking around getting robots to act in intelligent ways in the real world.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=chelsea+finn&sp...

I'm going to humbly put my kubecon talk here because it's unlike any conference talk you've ever seen and I'm really happy with how it turned out. https://youtu.be/VtedIghTPzI

I watched this in 2020 even though it's from EuroBSDCon 2019. I'm talking about Patricia Aas keynote "Embedded Ethics": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfNIiitVFtc

Hasn't aged one bit. If anything Patricia is spot on pretty much everything. If you don't have time to spend on this, you may want to take a look at the slides: https://www.slideshare.net/PatriciaAas/embedded-ethics-eurob...

My answer to the question "Where do you get all your ideas?"

https://youtu.be/MJmqaWq7PJY

Its about creativity and how to think about ideas.

The Leadership Guide for the Reluctant Leader: https://dev.tube/video/3PcL8UkorEg

It's not tech per se, but the "Golden Webinars in Astrophysics" series has a number of talks on a wide range of topics. The lectures are given by senior and well-respected people in their sub-fields. They are available in English and Spanish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsYCyopp4jY&list=PLnuCZ3n0pW...

Matti Picus' talk on Getting Involved with NumPy. It's one of the main libraries used in data science, so the talk is very useful. He discusses its start, development, governance, how to contribute and with an example of a pull request. It's a great resource on getting started with open source in python. https://youtu.be/lHJqOE5j6xE

I think the "talk" by Chris McCord should apply here "Build a real-time Twitter clone in 15 minutes with LiveView and Phoenix 1.5", while not really a talk this year was special and the demo completely blew my mind.

it's available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZvmYaFkNJI

Equilibrium over Space: The Canonical Urban Models with Dr. Edward Glaeser:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMmXo1nHetE

This is a very "tech" way of looking at space.

> It's been a weird year, wonder if there were still good tech talks in 2020.

If anything there are likely more than ever, because a lot of the ones that used to be delivered in person and not recorded may have been recorded this year.

Linda Rising: Thinking Fast and Slow https://youtu.be/XjbTLIqnq-o

(Just saw that this is from 2019 but it was the best I've seen in 2020)

I cant recall if it was released this year but Lamport's Intro to TLA+ (uploaded on youtube) stands out for me.

Brexit talks :-)

My favorite is Naval’s talk at Tim Ferriss:

https://tim.blog/2020/10/14/naval/amp/

https://www.weforum.org/great-reset/

Overall I agree with much of the tone that they set and some of the things are long overdue.

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Edit: duckduckgo censor the search query "the great reset" when you search for the first time. proof: https://imgur.com/UbsvTCz

Edit2: Changed from "sometimes" to "when you search for the first time" in response to the comment below.