Oral Tradition in Software Engineering
Bryan Cantrill·2016·Monktoberfest·30 minCantrill on how the craft is actually transmitted — stories, mentors, war anecdotes — and what gets lost when we pretend software is purely a written discipline.
Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of illumos
Bryan Cantrill·2011·USENIXLISACantrill tells the story of OpenSolaris, the Oracle acquisition, and how the kernel engineers behind ZFS, DTrace, and Zones carried the work forward into illumos.
Platform as a Reflection of Values
Bryan Cantrill·2017·Node SummitWhy every platform — language, OS, runtime — encodes a particular ordering of competing virtues, and why a good fit is really an alignment of values.
Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind
Bryan Cantrill·2017·GOTOCantrill on the discipline of debugging production systems in real time — staying analytical when the pager is screaming and the business is bleeding.
Zebras All the Way Down
Bryan Cantrill·2017·UptimeCantrill on the engineering of the data path — the unglamorous, decade-long work of building software that holds onto your bytes when everything else is on fire.
The Mind Behind Linux
_(cropped).jpeg){kind=small}
Linus Torvalds·2016·TEDAn unusually candid TED conversation in which Torvalds describes himself as an engineer, not a visionary, and explains the temperament behind Linux and Git.
All Questions Answered
Donald Knuth·2011·StanfordDon Knuth takes unscreened audience questions for an hour — on Wikipedia, on what's next in CS, on his most memorable mistakes, on how to write programs you can still read in twenty years.