Curated watching (programming)
Short list of high-signal talks on programming philosophy, complexity, and the industry mess we inherited. Sister to Curated watching (AI).
Personal posture and longer quote collections live on ryanjohnson.dev — Inspirations (including Cosette / DevCentr naming notes when added there). This page is the Dev-Centr canonical catalog for cross-linking from docs and tooling.
How this list grows
-
Add entries when a talk is fundamental enough to recommend across the org—not every good conference video.
-
Prefer decentralized host (when a same-work mirror exists) → publisher page → YouTube → Drive backup. See Decentralized video platforms.
-
Quote blocks include event and date so attribution survives lazy auto-transcripts.
Mandatory
The Mess We’re In
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
Title |
The Mess We’re In |
Speaker |
Joe Armstrong (co-creator of Erlang) |
Event / date |
Strange Loop, September 2014 |
Runtime |
~46 minutes |
YouTube |
|
Timestamp (medals / employment riff) |
|
Drive backup |
Google Drive copy ( |
Personal inspirations |
- Blurb
-
One of the best core programming philosophy videos worth recommending. Armstrong argues software entropy keeps rising: we no longer read broken programs—we Google them—and the state space of a laptop dwarfs intuition. The talk mixes polemic, physics limits, distributed-systems realism, and constructive ideas (content-addressed storage, condensing duplicate code). Watch before debating “why is everything so complicated?”
I think we should get big medals. My generation of programmers should get the Congressional Medal for creating employment—because in the last forty years we have written billions of lines of code that will keep programmers employed for trillions of man-hours in the next few thousand years to clean up this mess we’ve made. We are the job creators of the future; all that stuff we wrote years ago, these poor sods will be scratching their heads and going, what the hell does this stuff do?
The Mess We're In
|
Auto-generated YouTube captions garble the spoken line (by generational programmers). The abstract and Armstrong’s own published summaries use the billions of lines / thousands of years framing; the medals / Congressional Medal / my generation lines are from the live talk (~8:14). Prefer this block over raw captions. |
Mandatory — industry posture / ecosystems
WordPress Is Eating Itself Alive
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
Title |
WordPress Is Eating Itself Alive |
Channel |
|
Published |
1 September 2026 |
Runtime |
~35 minutes |
YouTube |
|
Drive backup |
Google Drive copy ( |
Decentralized host |
None found for this upload (2026-09-02). Re-check PeerTube / Odysee before linking only YouTube. Related Odysee coverage of the same conflict (different creators): Destination Linux, Brodie Robertson. |
- Blurb
-
How a GPL commons that powered ~40% of the web lost trust when company, foundation, and
.orgpipes collided with a private-equity host—and why Redis / Terraform / Elastic show the same extraction loop. Required context for open-source ecosystem failures and successes and Dev-Centr’s source-available licensing posture.
The Database That Should Be Dead but Runs the Internet
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
Title |
The Database That Should Be Dead but Runs the Internet |
Channel |
|
Published |
23 June 2026 |
Runtime |
~23 minutes |
YouTube |
|
Drive backup |
Google Drive copy ( |
Decentralized host |
None found for this upload (2026-09-02). Prefer PeerTube / Odysee if a same-work mirror appears. |
Stack browser |
PostgreSQL interaction layout |
- Blurb
-
Ingres → Postgres research → commercial dead-ends vs the volunteer track that outlived them: SQL port, donated hosting, optimizer/MVCC lore, EU antitrust naming Postgres as an Oracle constraint, JSON without abandoning relational roots, and cloud managed Postgres without a license flip. Fundamental teaching video for why Postgres sits at the bottom of many Dev-Centr database recommendations—and a contrast case next to WordPress/Redis license drama.