If there were just one video in the field of software and technology which I’ve watched this summer and would really like to recommend, then it’s this one from about a year ago:
Brian Ford: Is Node.js Better?
It’s 40 minutes long. It’s a presentation by Brian Ford, who has earned his marks in the Ruby world (not to be confused with another Brian Ford from the Angular.js community). He gets on stage at JSConf US 2012, a major conference on JavaScript and Node.js, and spends almost half an hour talking about everything but JavaScript.
At the end, he voices some serious concerns about Node.js in the high-end networking arena w.r.t. its single event-loop without threading, and how the Ruby community hit that wall long ago and made different choices. Interesting, also on a technical level.
But this is not really about language X vs language Y (yawn) – it’s about how we make choices in technology. No doubt your time is limited, and you may not even be interested in Node.js or Ruby, but all I can say is: it made me re-evaluate my positions and convictions, taught me about the power of honest argumentation, and got me to read that brilliant book by Daniel Kahneman, titled Thinking ,Fast and Slow (heavy read – I’m halfway).
Elevating stuff…