[Video 171] James Powell: Generators Will Free Your Mind

Generators are all the rage. Python has had them for a while, and is now moving rapidly to incorporate them even further, thanks to the Tulip project. JavaScript is getting them in ES6. But why do we care so much about generators? What can do they do for our programs, and for our understanding of how to write and improve those programs? In this talk James Powell shows us just how useful generators can be, and why they’re an important addition to your programming toolbox — in Python, but also in other languages.

[Video 170] Avdi Grimm: Exceptional Ruby

When programmers talk about exceptions, they often think about failure — when things have gone wrong. But exceptions can be used to do more than that; they can be used to make code more self-documenting, easier to debug, and more expressive. In this talk, based on his book Exceptional Ruby, Avdi Grimm describes Ruby’s exception system, and how it can be used to improve our code. If you’re a Ruby developer, then your code will likely improve as a result of seeing this talk.  (I know that mine has!)

[Video 169] Venkat Subramaniam: The Joy of Functional Programming

Functional programming is an old way of thinking about programming — but it is also making a huge comeback, thanks to a combination of expressiveness, readability, and ease of debugging. In this talk, Venkat Subramaniam describes how functional programming can make our lives easier, and the ways in which developers — including Java developers — can include this way of thinking into their work.

[Video 168] Joris Van Den Bossche: Introduction to Pandas

Pandas is a Python library for reading and manipulating structured data, and is quickly becoming a standard among a large number of data scientists looking to work with, clean, and analyze data. Indeed, that’s what many data scientists (and other analysts) spend a great deal of time doing: They have to take dirty data sets and clean them.  Then, after cleaning the data sets, the data has to be manipulated.  Finally, the results need to be displayed for others to see and use.  Pandas makes all of these tasks fairly easy, but also efficient — thanks in no small part to its use of NumPy arrays.

In this talk by researcher Joris Van den Bossche, we’re introduced to Pandas, learning about its functionality but also where and how to use it. If you’re a data scientist, or experimenting with such manipulations, then this talk will help you to understand Pandas from the perspective of someone who uses it every day.

Slides for the talk are at http://www.slideshare.net/PoleSystematicParisRegion/track-13-joris-van-den-bossche.

[Video 167] Kelsey Falter: From node.js to Go

Two different technologies have growing mindshare when it comes to high-performance Web applications: node.js and the Go language. How do these compare, in terms of development, community, and performance? What happens when a company decides to move from node.js to Go? Is it a clear win? If not, what are the trade-offs? In this talk, Kelsey Falter describes the decision-making process that she and her company went through in making such a transition. She provides an interesting comparison between node.js and Golang, and how a company might decide between the two.

[Video 166] Katie Miller: Coder Decoder — Functional Programmer Lingo Explained, with Pictures

Functional programming is hard for many people to understand. It doesn’t help that FP advocates use a vocabulary that’s different from the rest of the programming world. in particular, the word “monad” is known to strike fear in the hearts of many programmers.   In this talk, Katie Miller tries to de-mystify many of the terms associated with functional programming. She uses Haskell for her code examples, but manages to explain and describe these ideas in ways that will (hopefully) help you to understand what people mean.

[Video 165] Julia Evans: You can be a kernel hacker!

This talk is aimed at developers who spent their days (and nights) in high-level languages, and who are convinced that they couldn’t ever understand how the kernel works, let alone how to modify it. Julia Evans was like that until recently, and aims in this presentation to de-mystify the kernel, such that we can not only understand how it works, but even (maybe) try to modify and enhance it.

[Video 164] Mathias Bynens: JavaScript ♥ Unicode

Unicode makes it possible for programmers to work easily (or at least, more easily) with multiple character sets within a single program. Not all developers know how to work with Unicode, and not all developers realize that JavaScript natively supports Unicode. Moreover, not everyone realizes what it means for JavaScript to natively support Unicode. This talk, by front-end developer Mathias Bynens, describes the Uniocde support, but also some of the surprises that JavaScript has for people expecting to use this support.

Jeffrey Biles: Embering on the Shoulders of Giants

Ember.js is a popular open-source framework for creating client-side Web applications. But over time, Ember.js has grown to include, or be associated with, a large number of other technologies. In this screencast, Jeffrey Biles introduces the many different members of the Ember.js family, and describes what they do, and how they work together.   If you’re interested in client-side development, and especially if you’re interested in Ember, then this is a good, quick introduction to the different technologies you’ll be learning and using.

Mark Smith: Building Services in Go

Go is an open-source systems language that has gotten a great deal of attention for the ease with which it lets you create concurrent services, and especially network services. In this talk, Mark Smith demonstrates how to create a network service in Go, using Go’s patterns such as goroutines and channels.  If you’re interested in creating network services that can scale massively, or just in how Go works, this talk will likely be of interest to you.