[HN Gopher] Most-Watched Software Engineering Talks of 2024
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Most-Watched Software Engineering Talks of 2024
Author : cempaka
Score : 235 points
Date : 2025-02-12 15:55 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.techtalksweekly.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.techtalksweekly.io)
| the_arun wrote:
| Does this cover only GOTO conferences? If so we need to update
| the title to avoid being clickbait.
| rgreasons wrote:
| It appears to contain a bunch of other conferences. NDC,
| ElixirConf, etc.
| martypitt wrote:
| No, there's content from lots of different conferences (though,
| GOTO is there a lot -- maybe a good indicator of quality?)
| culi wrote:
| popularity [?] quality
| dowager_dan99 wrote:
| for a Mr. Beast video, maybe that's true, but for a
| specific audience like "Developer Conference Talk" probably
| a decent proxy
| belter wrote:
| rust vs javascript ?
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Having watched a lot of the goto talks, I'd say that
| they're like a good tech conference: ~5-10% of the talks
| could have a major impact on your work/career, 20-30% of
| the talks are interesting and slightly useful, and the
| remaining talks are basically product pitches / sponsor
| slots, which can be useful but are often biased.
| culi wrote:
| If I'm not asking for too much, I'd love to see an
| example of a talk you consider a member of the "could
| have a major impact on your work" bucket
| infecto wrote:
| https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/tech-conferences
|
| List of conferences the author covers
| rgreasons wrote:
| Really surprised at the lack of "big" names on the list. My gut
| reaction was "really, no PyCon?" But when I went to the PyCon
| channel, even the keynotes from last year barely cracked a
| thousand views.
| ai-christianson wrote:
| > Really surprised at the lack of "big" names on the list.
|
| I think it's pretty cool we're hearing from more voices though.
| whalesalad wrote:
| There is nothing interesting going on at pycon, usually. Most
| language-specific conferences tend to be pretty boring imho.
| culi wrote:
| Depends on the language. Julia has a lot of cool stuff going
| on. And really small languages like Elm (when it was still
| being used) would probably involve a lot of discussion about
| programming language history and future considerations
| simonw wrote:
| I just checked and my PyCon keynote got 6,200 - pretty happy
| with that! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1-KQZZarpc
| rgreasons wrote:
| I consider you a pretty big name in our little corner of the
| world, so that number seemed pretty low to me! Expected 5
| figures at least!!
| chickenzzzzu wrote:
| [flagged]
| syndicatedjelly wrote:
| Is number of YouTube views the new metric for gauging how
| much "people care about learning to program"?
| apwell23 wrote:
| yes
| ojhughes wrote:
| The days of people entering the industry to make big
| money are probably behind us.
| apwell23 wrote:
| good
| swyx wrote:
| hmm sounds like your AIE keynote was bigger than PyCon :)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTTMUWP5B0s
| woodruffw wrote:
| Seems like this over-indexes on a small handful of conferences (I
| had never heard of GOTO before this). It would be interesting to
| better understand the methodology here, particularly around
| discovering talks on YouTube.
| Graziano_M wrote:
| Linus's talk is on there twice. If you add up the view counts, it
| should be much higher.
| whalesalad wrote:
| RIP strangeloop </3
| spitfire wrote:
| So what (if anything) is taking strangeloops' place?
| abletonlive wrote:
| Hopefully nothing. I've been to three and it's a huge self
| congratulatory waste of time for everybody. Like most
| software conferences
| sitkack wrote:
| Sturgeon's Law is fractal, I have also been to three and
| don't regret it. Your frame of mind shapes an experience as
| much as the actual experience.
| code_biologist wrote:
| "have you tried rubbing a database on it" feels like a
| spiritual sibling.
| sitkack wrote:
| 718 videos https://www.youtube.com/@StrangeLoopConf
| McUsr wrote:
| Thanks. I wasn't aware of this channel. :)
| EncomLab wrote:
| Wish Jon Blow would get back out there! He was asked on a recent
| stream and said he has turned down invites while trying to get
| Jai pushed out the door.
| RohMin wrote:
| I really want to learn his methodology to writing software
| chickenzzzzu wrote:
| His methodology is to put his hands on the keyboard, write a
| function, a struct, make it compile, make it produce the
| correct output, make it faster, make it use less memory...
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Considering how much software he has actually put out... do
| you?
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| Check the Data Oriented Design talk:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc
| paxcoder wrote:
| Jai has been in development for a decade. I would appreciate if
| it were finally open-sourced.
| EncomLab wrote:
| Considering the fact that Jon despises open-source you might
| be waiting a long time.
| stavros wrote:
| Why does he despise open-source?
| EncomLab wrote:
| There are many rant videos available online - but in
| general the core of his software philosophy is based in
| minimal, clean, extremely optimized code. Open-source
| rarely results in any of those things. Jon is the last
| guy wandering in the desert, still devoted to concise
| code - I love him for it.
| stavros wrote:
| I feel like he's barking up the wrong tree, opening up
| his source code doesn't mean the code will get dirty. He
| can simply refuse any contributions.
| eximius wrote:
| I do think that the `SOA` struct modifier keyword is maybe the
| most interesting thing out of Jai. Other languages would do
| well to think about adopting a mechanism to support something
| like it.
| atombender wrote:
| My understanding is that it's been moved to a convenience
| macro and is no longer a syntax-level thing. The original
| videos where Blow talked about SOA at the language level is
| very old now, and the language has gone through a lot of
| changes.
| gamedever wrote:
| this is a list from their videos, not all videos. There's plenty
| of software engineering videos with 5x or 10x more views
|
| Here's 850k views https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SO83KQuuZvg
|
| look up "how to build and LLM" and your find plenty of videos
| with more than a million views from 2024
| ge96 wrote:
| Sebastian Lague is amazing I liked his 3D world package drop
| game video
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| As others have noted, there are some problems with the
| methodology of how this list has been created.
|
| First, the list of "almost every" Software Engineering conference
| around the World[1] used, is just 72 items long. This feels
| light, and some conferences I would expect to see are missing:
| Brighton Ruby is very popular in the UK, but possibly a bit
| niche, so fine; but, FOSDEM however, seems more of a glaring
| oversight, perhaps explained by the fact that most of those talks
| are published not through a single channel.
|
| The author has a mechanism to add confs to this. We could try and
| help them with that.
|
| Then, the list seems to have ordered talks published by each
| conference's YouTube channel, by total views.
|
| When one of those channels posts a talk twice (for example, the
| Linux Foundation's keynote of Linus talking to Dirk Hohndel), you
| end up with split user counts which means its lower down the list
| than you might expect.
|
| I also think this means we're now measuring "most watched" in a
| slightly weird way: is this now just a reflection of marketing
| and subscriber reach? GOTO has 1.04M subscribers, ReactConf just
| 28.5K - is it any surprise that the list has more talks with more
| views from one of those over the other? Who is to say which conf
| had the better or more interesting talks?
|
| Other engagement metrics (thumbs up, percentage of subs, number
| of comments, how many inbound links, and so on), might provide a
| better number to proxy for "quality" or "best" than just views,
| although the author isn't making a claim for quality, just views,
| so perhaps I'm asking for something beyond what is reasonable or
| what was promised.
|
| This is a good start of an idea though, it wouldn't take much to
| make it better, so best of luck to the author or those who want
| to steal the idea: I'd love to see a better list in the future,
| and perhaps over a longer period of time than one year, too.
|
| [1] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/tech-conferences
| guipsp wrote:
| It's also missing most (all?) of the more academic conferences.
| neves wrote:
| You are nitpicking.
|
| They just did an algorithm to list a bunch of popular/nice
| talks for software engineers. I'll watch a bunch of them.
|
| I'd like to see my fellow hacker news members to point to good
| talks that aren't present in the list.
| rtfeldman wrote:
| Agreed - as a concrete example of an omission, I gave a talk at
| Philly ETE 2024 whose view count would put it at #14 on this
| list:
|
| https://youtu.be/vQPHtAxOZZw
| elric wrote:
| I got to see some of these in person, though at different
| conferences. If you're at all interested in Java, the talks by
| Venkat Subramaniam and Nicolai Parlog are worth a watch.
| tasuki wrote:
| > If you're at all interested in Java
|
| Is that even a thing in 2025? I thought the consensus was that
| Kotlin has a strictly better syntax than Java.
|
| (I'm not even a Kotlin fan. I was pretty sad when Kotlin
| started taking Scala's market share...)
| danielovichdk wrote:
| Are speakers being paid these days ?
| heinrichhartman wrote:
| Regular speaker here (who is also on the list).
|
| I was never payed for a talk, and I have very rarely heared of
| people being payed by the conference itself -- appart from some
| "rock-star" keynotes.
|
| Generally talks are sponsored by the person you currently work
| for - i.e. they pay for travel, and sponsor your time. If you
| work for a vendor in the space, this runs under marketing
| expense. If you work for a "regular" company this runs under
| personal development, employer branding & industry exchange.
| sidchilling wrote:
| I don't like watching videos (or rather can't watch at night, but
| can read). To date I haven't found an AI that can produce a good
| article from a video. No, not just transcribe the video but
| actually produce a quality article with images and stuff from the
| video. Like a human who is instructed as "watch this video and
| produce a very high quality article that talks about the things
| talked about in the video".
|
| Has anyone has any luck with this?
|
| It would be awesome if I can give this link to AI that will
| produce a PDF, each video being a chapter in the PDF.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _would be awesome if I can give this link to AI that will
| produce a PDF, each video being a chapter in the PDF_
|
| If you've got is slides+YouTube, then https://notebooklm.google
| [0] might work wonderfully well. It does for me. Though, it
| more Q&A than an article with illustration.
|
| [0] https://illuminate.google.com is its limited/audio-only
| alternative.
| pistoriusp wrote:
| I know these are conferences that they track, but I happen to
| know the Scott's talk from FOSDEM titled "So You Think You Know
| Git?" is at 1.3m million views:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aolI_Rz0ZqY
| swyx wrote:
| for AI Engineering here is what was popular (30k-300k views):
|
| - Jerry Liu on Agentic RAG:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeAyuLc_f3Q
|
| - Emil Eifrem on GraphRAG:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knDDGYHnnSI&t=2s
|
| - Justine Tunney on LlamaFile:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mRi-B3t6fA
|
| - Daniel Han on Low Level Technicals of LLMs:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRM_P6UfdIc&t=5094s
|
| theres a long tail of others that didnt get the views but i
| consider quality. we also do AI Engineering Management talks now
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiq95JYpBGY&list=PLcfpQ4tk2k...
| oars wrote:
| Good OP but even better posts in thread.
| darksaints wrote:
| I watched a little bit of the filesystems in rust talk and while
| it was a fairly straightforward talk, I was shocked at the q&a
| session. Emotionally hyperbolic ranting, jumping to conclusions,
| and wild accusations. I had no idea the linux community was so
| childish and reactionary towards rust.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| What do you mean? That wasn't a Q&A session, they interrupted
| the speaker and ate all the time arguing. The speaker didn't
| get to finish his presentation.
|
| This makes me think, whoever wrote these top 100 talks has
| either questionable tastes or just did a simple query and
| filter (SELECT * FROM youtube.video WHERE tag = tech SORT BY
| youtube.video.views LIMIT 100).
| jaxr wrote:
| It clearly says the most watched talks, so yes. The author
| mentions in the article "from the conferences I follow"
| sangeeth96 wrote:
| I really wish there existed a central platform that tracks/links
| to all tech conference videos from past to present because
| YouTube just plain sucks for this and in general, to focus.
| They've had DECADES to polish this experience (in general for any
| educational content), at least under the premium tier and I've
| given up all hopes of them ever getting this right.
|
| Off the top of my head, such a platform could:
| 1. Encourage and foster great discussions (and support markdown!)
| 2. Have a "community notes" kind of feature to highlight outdated
| info, errata, related talks etc. 3. Expose brand new
| conferences and lesser known ones 4. Allow people to
| share curated lists 5. Likes/dislikes restored 6.
| View count tracking from across multiple sources (some confs host
| on their site before YouTube upload) 7. Support for
| interactive viewing of decks, source code etc. 8. Speaker
| profiles (w/ verification) 9. Automation to help
| conferences/speakers/etc. to submit/update content they own/keep
| things in sync
|
| etc.
|
| I don't think such a platform exists today but would love to be
| wrong.
| apwell23 wrote:
| this sounds like a lot of work for something this niche
| wslh wrote:
| I don't think this is about a niche but rather a broader need
| for lists, more specifically, integrated lists from users.
| Pinterest, for example, is built around lists, Amazon has
| wishlists, IMDb[1] provides movie rankings, etc.
|
| From a data portability perspective, the real challenge is
| getting users to connect all these platforms to a kind of
| unified list, making it accessible for queries, machine
| learning, or other applications. This, in my view, is a
| traction problem rather than a technical one, independent of
| whether it justifies a business. FriendFeed[2] was a very
| interesting project where users could connect their profiles
| with many services and their followers saw their updates. It
| seems their Tornado web server keeps getting updated [3].
|
| More than a decade ago, I explored some of these ideas
| [4][5], conceptualizing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) model
| where data operations could be performed at a global level,
| dynamically recalculating like a spreadsheet.
|
| Going to more complex topics there are resources such as
| differential dataflows [6].
|
| [1] My movies ranking:
| https://www.imdb.com/user/ur0601133/ratings/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FriendFeed
|
| [3] https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado
|
| [4] https://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-
| orchestration...
|
| [5] https://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/
|
| [6] https://timelydataflow.github.io/differential-
| dataflow/intro...
| jll29 wrote:
| I think this is a great idea for a startup.
|
| As a scientist, I would definitely be a paying customer, and on
| top I could deduct that membership from my taxes or have my lab
| pay for it like we (like many others) are paying Overleaf just
| under $1000 a year only to have LaTeX run in a Web browser to
| collaborate on papers (now my most important online
| service/app).
|
| We usually know where to find the talks and recordings for the
| conference venues of our own specialist areas, but if there was
| a general "ScienceTube"-type Web site, you could also check out
| talks from neighboring disciplines. God knows, this might be as
| useful/addictive as HN.
|
| Should you want to launch this & need someone for the
| scientific advisory board, please get in touch.
|
| EDIT: typo fixed
| no_wizard wrote:
| >I think this is a great idea for a startup
|
| Ideally, this runs like wikipedia or Lichess, if I'm being
| honest. I don't think its a great business model for a VC
| backed startup[0]. Perhaps a more traditional business
| inception might work, if you are selling it to the big
| conference organizations / hosts and make it attractive
| enough for it to be their go to for posting videos and such.
|
| I think it ends up imploding against the pressures that come
| with it with being a VC startup though.
|
| [0]: I'm taking the term startup to mean shorthand for
| venture backed startup, as it is usually used on HN and other
| places.
| weitendorf wrote:
| It's much more like wikipedia than Lichess IMO.
|
| The hard part with going completely free is building enough
| of a community of strong contributors that they are able to
| effectively curate the contents for quality's sake, rather
| than the obvious commercial and career incentives to
| advertise their own work (or sneak in less educational
| content). That could be very hard to bootstrap without
| doing a ton of the curation yourself initially, and it
| requires an ongoing commitment to manage the community once
| it is established, which is also time consuming.
|
| > I'm taking the term startup to mean shorthand for venture
| backed startup, as it is usually used on HN and other
| places.
|
| I don't agree with that characterization because there are
| plenty of viable and useful "start up" opportunities that
| require zero outside funding, or only enough to get
| started. Also, VC funding is literally just debt that can
| convert to equity (it's a loan that can have an extremely
| high effective interest rate if you're successful), so you
| actually want to avoid it as much as possible if you think
| you have a good shot at accomplishing your goals without
| it. I think a surprisingly large number of founders and
| people working in SV/startups don't fully understand that.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| Network egress fees are going to kill you, unless you have
| sufficient capital to run your own DC
| the_duke wrote:
| I've had the same idea a few years ago and started working on
| it, but never found the time to push it over the finish line.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Likes/dislikes restored
|
| Why? It leads to a lot of abuse.
| jrajav wrote:
| What you see as abuse some would see as user agency. User
| agency is a very powerful thing, and it's shortsighted to
| squash it just because your users aren't using it strictly to
| enhance your content in the way you want.
|
| It's especially shortsighted to squash it just because they
| used it on some of your advertisers' content and your
| advertisers yelled at you about it.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I think my point is that it requires a (perhaps opaque)
| algorithm to work well. A pure popularity metric never led
| to good quality in my experience.
|
| So even if you have your up/down votes, expect that how
| videos are presented to you are not strongly reflective of
| the vote count.
| culi wrote:
| There's a good directory of conferences at https://confs.tech/
| and at https://dev.events/
| itscrush wrote:
| The security community used to maintain one that was fairly
| active pre-covid.
|
| https://github.com/PaulSec/awesome-sec-talks
| apwell23 wrote:
| I don't see anything ever dethroning this tech talk from no 1
| position
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
| spacechild1 wrote:
| I didn't expect so many C++ talks in this list. Not bad for a
| supposedly dying language :)
|
| "Introduction to Wait-free Algorithms in C++ Programming" by
| Daniel Anderson (https://youtube.com/watch?v=kPh8pod0-gk) is a
| very good talk, btw!
| gpderetta wrote:
| Reports of C++ death are greatly exaggerated.
| culi wrote:
| There was a post on HN that just got removed a minute ago about a
| Syrian tech conference. Inevitably someone asked if there were
| any women speakers of note. Out of curiosity I counted up the
| femme speakers in this list. By the time I finished counting the
| thread was deleted so I'm gonna post my findings here:
|
| 13 out of 100
|
| There were a couple with multiple speakers but they were always
| all masc except for one that had like 10 speakers
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(page generated 2025-02-12 23:01 UTC)