complexity

This week’s classic pick is Joe Armstrong’s 2014 Strange Loop talk The Mess We’re In — a 45-minute polemic from the co-creator of Erlang on why software is getting worse, what the laws of physics say about how fast computation could be, and how we should stop using human-chosen file names. Armstrong died in 2019, but the talk has aged remarkably well: in the era of 128-parallel coding agents, his entropy critique reads less like nostalgia and more like a warning we’ve kept ignoring....

Weekly Video Notes — Classic of the Week. A foundational talk worth re-watching, paired with key frames and a short essay on why it still matters. Fifteen years after it was delivered, Rich Hickey’s “Simple Made Easy” remains the single best talk on software complexity ever recorded. The thesis is one sentence — simple and easy are different things, and conflating them is the root cause of most accidental complexity....