Most-Watched Software Engineering Talks of 2024

I really wish there existed a central platform that tracks/links to all tech conference videos from past to present because YouTube just plain sucks for this and in general, to focus. They've had DECADES to polish this experience (in general for any educational content), at least under the premium tier and I've given up all hopes of them ever getting this right.

Off the top of my head, such a platform could:

    1. Encourage and foster great discussions (and support markdown!)
    2. Have a "community notes" kind of feature to highlight outdated info, errata, related talks etc.
    3. Expose brand new conferences and lesser known ones
    4. Allow people to share curated lists
    5. Likes/dislikes restored
    6. View count tracking from across multiple sources (some confs host on their site before YouTube upload)
    7. Support for interactive viewing of decks, source code etc.
    8. Speaker profiles (w/ verification)
    9. Automation to help conferences/speakers/etc. to submit/update content they own/keep things in sync

I don't think such a platform exists today but would love to be wrong.

As others have noted, there are some problems with the methodology of how this list has been created.

First, the list of "almost every" Software Engineering conference around the World[1] used, is just 72 items long. This feels light, and some conferences I would expect to see are missing: Brighton Ruby is very popular in the UK, but possibly a bit niche, so fine; but, FOSDEM however, seems more of a glaring oversight, perhaps explained by the fact that most of those talks are published not through a single channel.

The author has a mechanism to add confs to this. We could try and help them with that.

Then, the list seems to have ordered talks published by each conference's YouTube channel, by total views.

When one of those channels posts a talk twice (for example, the Linux Foundation's keynote of Linus talking to Dirk Hohndel), you end up with split user counts which means its lower down the list than you might expect.

I also think this means we're now measuring "most watched" in a slightly weird way: is this now just a reflection of marketing and subscriber reach? GOTO has 1.04M subscribers, ReactConf just 28.5K - is it any surprise that the list has more talks with more views from one of those over the other? Who is to say which conf had the better or more interesting talks?

Other engagement metrics (thumbs up, percentage of subs, number of comments, how many inbound links, and so on), might provide a better number to proxy for "quality" or "best" than just views, although the author isn't making a claim for quality, just views, so perhaps I'm asking for something beyond what is reasonable or what was promised.

This is a good start of an idea though, it wouldn't take much to make it better, so best of luck to the author or those who want to steal the idea: I'd love to see a better list in the future, and perhaps over a longer period of time than one year, too.

[1] https://www.techtalksweekly.io/p/tech-conferences

I know these are conferences that they track, but I happen to know the Scott's talk from FOSDEM titled "So You Think You Know Git?" is at 1.3m million views:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aolI_Rz0ZqY

Really surprised at the lack of “big” names on the list. My gut reaction was “really, no PyCon?” But when I went to the PyCon channel, even the keynotes from last year barely cracked a thousand views.

for AI Engineering here is what was popular (30k-300k views):

- Jerry Liu on Agentic RAG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeAyuLc_f3Q

- Emil Eifrem on GraphRAG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knDDGYHnnSI&t=2s

- Justine Tunney on LlamaFile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mRi-B3t6fA

- Daniel Han on Low Level Technicals of LLMs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRM_P6UfdIc&t=5094s

theres a long tail of others that didnt get the views but i consider quality. we also do AI Engineering Management talks now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiq95JYpBGY&list=PLcfpQ4tk2k...

I don’t like watching videos (or rather can’t watch at night, but can read). To date I haven’t found an AI that can produce a good article from a video. No, not just transcribe the video but actually produce a quality article with images and stuff from the video. Like a human who is instructed as “watch this video and produce a very high quality article that talks about the things talked about in the video”.

Has anyone has any luck with this?

It would be awesome if I can give this link to AI that will produce a PDF, each video being a chapter in the PDF.

I watched a little bit of the filesystems in rust talk and while it was a fairly straightforward talk, I was shocked at the q&a session. Emotionally hyperbolic ranting, jumping to conclusions, and wild accusations. I had no idea the linux community was so childish and reactionary towards rust.

Wish Jon Blow would get back out there! He was asked on a recent stream and said he has turned down invites while trying to get Jai pushed out the door.

Does this cover only GOTO conferences? If so we need to update the title to avoid being clickbait.

I got to see some of these in person, though at different conferences. If you're at all interested in Java, the talks by Venkat Subramaniam and Nicolai Parlog are worth a watch.

Linus's talk is on there twice. If you add up the view counts, it should be much higher.