💥 Issue 87

Featuring 12 talks of the week you need to be aware of

Happy Wednesday 👋 and warm welcome to Tech Talks Weekly #87!

Recently, the emails have become quite long and to make them easier to read and navigate, I’ll be moving the 📆 New Talks and 📆 New Podcasts sections to a separate static page.

Instead of listing all talks directly in the email, you’ll now find a link that takes you to a dedicated page with the list.

Over time, I might improve these pages with features such as search or filtering.

I hope you like this change!

Just before we start…

Hit the ❤️ or leave a comment if you like this issue. It helps more readers discover Tech Talks Weekly on Substack.

Thank you 🙏

Now get ready and let’s jump right in!

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🏆 Featured this week

Here are our top recommendations this week. Make sure to watch or listen!

1. ⭐️ “Can you prove AI ROI in Software Eng? (Stanford 120k Devs Study) – Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Stanford”
   Conference ⸱ +17k views ⸱ Dec 11, 2025 ⸱ 00h 16m 40s

   tldw: Stanford data from 120k developers explains why identical AI tools can give 0% productivity increase in some teams and 25%+ in others and shares a framework for measuring real ROI instead of tracking PR counts or DORA.
   ⭐️ If you have time for only one talk this week, watch this one.

2. “GopherCon 2025: An Operating System in Go - Patricio Whittingslow”
   Conference ⸱ +7k views ⸱ Dec 11, 2025 ⸱ 00h 23m 10s

   tldw: This talk proves Go can be a systems programming language by showing an OS built with TinyGo, with live demos and enough surprises to make you want to watch it.

3. “Rust’s Atomic Memory Model: The Logic Behind Safe Concurrency - Martin Ombura Jr. | EuroRust 2025”
   Conference ⸱ +1k views ⸱ Dec 10, 2025 ⸱ 00h 39m 14s

   tldw: Watch this talk to learn how Ordering types like Relaxed, Acquire, Release, AcqRel and SeqCst control visibility and performance and how Mutex, Once and Arc use them in real code.

4. “Getting Buy-In: Overcoming Larman’s Law • Allen Holub • GOTO 2025”
   Conference ⸱ +1k views ⸱ Dec 11, 2025 ⸱ 00h 56m 17s

   tldw: Organizational inertia makes good ideas sound like religion or theory. This talk shows how to build a business case using Conway’s Law, value stream mapping and time value of money so you can actually get buy-in for e.g. mob programming and no-estimation approachs.

5. “Vibe Coding Costs You 20% Productivity | Shawn Swyx Wang”
   Conference ⸱ +900 views ⸱ Dec 10, 2025 ⸱ 00h 18m 03s

   tldw: AI “vibe coding” cuts real productivity by about 20% by piling up technical debt. This talk shows the data as well as solutions you can actually use like to improve it.

6. “AWS re:Invent 2025 - Advanced feature flags: Faster releases and rapid recovery (DEV320)”
   Conference ⸱ +400 views ⸱ Dec 11, 2025 ⸱ 00h 53m 20s

   tldw: Feature flags are more than on/off switches and this code first talk shows real AppConfig examples.

7. “2025 State of Cloud in Review” from The Cloudcast
   Podcast ⸱ Dec 17, 2025 ⸱ 00h 52m 03s

   tldl: 2025 State of Cloud in Review summarizes the year in cloud, hands out awards and flags the biggest trends of 2025. Listen if you want a quick catch up on what happened this year.

8. “Fundamentals of Data Engineering • Matt Housley & Joe Reis” from GOTO
   Podcast ⸱ Dec 16, 2025 ⸱ 00h 33m 20s

   tldl: Two data engineering authors explain core principles, common tradeoffs and architecture patterns for building reliable data pipelines.

9. “#201 The “AI is going to replace devs” hype is over – 22-year developer veteran Jason Lengstorf” from The freeCodeCamp Podcast
   Podcast ⸱ Dec 12, 2025 ⸱ 01h 08m 25s

   tldl: A 22-year developer explains why the “AI will replace devs” panic fizzled, how hiring overreacted and is rebounding and what actually helps you land roles in the post-LLM job market.

10. “The AI Productivity Gap with Keith Townsend” from Screaming in the Cloud
    Podcast ⸱ Dec 11, 2025 ⸱ 00h 41m 23s

    tldl: AI tools are making solo founders absurdly productive while big companies treat them like radioactive material. Watch this conversation for real stories about a biopharma rejecting Copilot, why startups can risk what enterprises can’t and what needs to change to close the gap.

11. “Valhalla? Python? Withers? Lombok? - Ask the Architects at JavaOne’25”
    Conference ⸱ +11k views ⸱ Dec 14, 2025 ⸱ 00h 52m 02s

    tldw: A live panel of Java architects answers audience questions on Valhalla, Loom, Lombok, ... and whether Java should give up semicolons.

12. “GeeCON 2024: Ron Veen - Stream Gathers - The biggest change to Java Streams since 10 years”
    Conference ⸱ <100 views ⸱ Dec 10, 2025 ⸱ 00h 40m 26s

    tldw: Java 22 finally gives streams real custom intermediate operations with Stream Gatherers, making what you can do in the middle of a stream much more flexible. Watch this to see the new API and a custom gatherer built from start to finish.

📈 The Most Watched This Week

See what everyone’s watching this week and don’t miss out! Here are the top 10 most-watched talks ranked by views/publishing time.

1. “From Vibe Coding To Vibe Engineering – Kitze, Sizzy” ⸱ +33k views ⸱ Dec 14, 2025 ⸱ 00h 25m 28s

2. “Next.js at the speed of Bun” ⸱ +17k views ⸱ Dec 15, 2025 ⸱ 00h 18m 51s

3. “What We Learned Deploying AI within Bloomberg’s Engineering Organization – Lei Zhang, Bloomberg” ⸱ +4k views ⸱ Dec 16, 2025 ⸱ 00h 18m 21s

4. “Building in the Gemini Era – Kat Kampf & Ammaar Reshi, Google DeepMind” ⸱ +9k views ⸱ Dec 15, 2025 ⸱ 00h 17m 57s

5. “Proactive Agents – Kath Korevec, Google Labs” ⸱ +18k views ⸱ Dec 13, 2025 ⸱ 00h 16m 51s

6. “Valhalla? Python? Withers? Lombok? - Ask the Architects at JavaOne’25” ⸱ +11k views ⸱ Dec 14, 2025 ⸱ 00h 52m 02s

   tldw: A live panel of Java architects answers audience questions on Valhalla, Loom, Lombok, ... and whether Java should give up semicolons.

7. “Moving away from Agile: What’s Next – Martin Harrysson & Natasha Maniar, McKinsey & Company” ⸱ +16k views ⸱ Dec 12, 2025 ⸱ 00h 21m 55s

8. “Can you prove AI ROI in Software Eng? (Stanford 120k Devs Study) – Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Stanford” ⸱ +17k views ⸱ Dec 11, 2025 ⸱ 00h 16m 40s

   tldw: Stanford data from 120k developers explains why identical AI tools can give 0% productivity increase in some teams and 25%+ in others and shares a framework for measuring real ROI instead of tracking PR counts or DORA.

9. “Hard Won Lessons from Building Effective AI Coding Agents – Nik Pash, Cline” ⸱ +11k views ⸱ Dec 12, 2025 ⸱ 00h 14m 18s

10. “The State of AI Code Quality: Hype vs Reality — Itamar Friedman, Qodo” ⸱ +12k views ⸱ Dec 11, 2025 ⸱ 00h 21m 15s

📆 New talks

Here’s the complete list of all the talks published since the last Tech Talks Weekly issue, grouped by conference, and ordered by the number of views for your convenience.

This section is available here.

📆 New podcasts

Here’s the complete list of all the podcasts published since the last Tech Talks Weekly issue.

This section is available here.

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Enjoy the weekend ☀️ and see you next week!