Rubyists need to know about the method cache, because it determines the speed of the rest of the system. In this talk, Sheena McCoy and Rachel Myers describe how Ruby caches methods, and thus makes our method calls faster than would otherwise be the case.
How would you implement your own Hash class? In this talk, Nathan Lane tells us about O(n) and O(1) , and how hashes do their work.
How can we encourage more girls and women to learn programming? Jessica McKellar’s talk, from PyCon 2014, has some very interesting insights into what has worked in Tennessee high schools.
Agent-based modeling is a powerful technique for simulating complex systems. This talk introduces the ideas behind agent-based modeling, and describes some of the ways in which we can understand many phenomena using it.
Legendary developer Rob Pike describes why programmers should understand the different ways in which programs can execute things in parallel.
I’m increasingly intrigued by the Rust language, and what is offers programmers. Steve Klabnik discusses what Rust brings to the table, and why programmers — including developers in such languages as Python and Ruby — should be excited about Rust.
How is a column-oriented database different, and what advantages does it have over traditional, row-oriented databases?
When you write Ruby code, are you doing so in a Ruby style? Ernie Miller shows how you can, but shouldn’t, write in Ruby.
How should you write tests? What should you test? Sandi Metz presents ideas for how you should think about testing.
People are often surprised to find that PostgreSQL uses processes, rather than threads. This talk, by Bruce Momjian, describes how PostgreSQL’s processes share memory, and thus allow the database to operate efficiently despite its use of processes.