More technical talks —
Since my blog post arguing that Technical talks should be recorded, I’ve continued to record talks – here are the new recordings since that post, mostly from the Django Boston meetup group:
- Adam Marcus – How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Crowd
- TC39 JavaScript Panel at Bocoup, 2013-09-18
- Matt Makai – Staying sane while taking over an existing Django codebase
- Sean Creeley – Using Django with MVC JavaScript Frameworks
- Anna Callahan – South: stable and database-independent migrations
- Ethan Soergel – Class-Based Views: A DRY approach to view logic in Django
- Ben Greene – Performance Tuning in Django
- Gadi Oren – Django + MongoDB: building a custom ORM layer
My award for “best anecdote” goes to Adam Marcus’s talk, which taught me that if you ask 100 Mechanical Turk workers to toss a coin and tell you whether it’s heads or tails, you’ll get approximately 70 heads. Consistently. This either means that everyone’s tossing biased/unfair coins, or (and this is the right answer) that you can’t trust the average Turk worker to actually perform a task that takes a couple of seconds. (Adam Marcus goes on to describe a hierarchy where you start out giving deterministic tasks to multiple workers as cross-checks against each other, and then over time you build relationships with and promote individual workers whose prior output has been proven trustworthy.)