💥 Issue 91: 8,000 subscribers 🎉, S3 as a DB?!, Startup Software Architecture, Estimation is a waste of time, MCPs in Java, Spec-driven development, ...
The Technical Decisions That Don’t Make the Videos. (Sponsored)
You can watch the tech talks on LLMs and scalable architectures. What’s harder to find: the post-incident discussion, the trade-offs made, and what teams would do differently.
At QCon London (March 16-19), senior software engineers and architects share practical lessons from production and the parts that don’t make the blog post.
Happy Wednesday 👋 and a warm welcome to Tech Talks Weekly #91!
Before we start, I’d like to share great news:
Tech Talks Weekly has reached 8,000 subscribers! 🎉
That number blows my mind especially because Tech Talks Weekly is growing organically, mainly through word of mouth. As a newsletter writer, that’s kind of a dream 🙂
I’m really grateful you’re here and thanks for sticking around 🙏
That said, get ready and let’s jump right in!
🏆 Featured this week
Here are our top recommendations this week. Watch now or bookmark!
“Building a Serverless Database on S3: Lessons from Man Group” from QCon London 2025
Conference ⸱ +400 views ⸱ Jan 26, 2026 ⸱ 00h 42m 26stldw: A hedge fund ditched a huge MongoDB cluster and built a time series database straight on S3 with a thick client pushing 40GB/s. This talk explains the tradeoffs around atomicity, versioning, metadata, etc.
“Estimation is a waste of time | Maria Chec” from LeadDev New York 2025
Conference ⸱ +1k views ⸱ Jan 22, 2026 ⸱ 00h 27m 37stldw: Story points and “perfect” estimates mostly turn into fake deadlines. This talk shows how a team switched to forecasting with real cycle time data to give ranges instead.
“Building and Securing MCP Servers in Java” from jChampions 2026
Conference ⸱ +300 views ⸱ Jan 23, 2026 ⸱ 00h 59m 40stldw: A live coding session showing how to build and secure MCP servers in Java.
“Spec-driven Development: How AI Changed Everything (And Nothing)” from jChampions 2026
Conference ⸱ +300 views ⸱ Jan 27, 2026 ⸱ 01h 04m 39stldw: AI makes coding faster, but code still becomes the source of truth. This talk argues for spec first development where you write requirements once and let AI generate the diagrams, code, and tests.
“From Scripts to Buy-In: How Small Clojure Wins Create Big Opportunities - Choomnuan” from Clojure/Conj 2025
Conference ⸱ +1k views ⸱ Jan 21, 2026 ⸱ 00h 10m 31stldw: If you want to sneak Clojure into your team, this talk shows how to win a buy-in by shipping tiny tools that fix real problems.
“Startup Software Architecture - You Never Really Throw It Away: A Conversation with David Gudeman” from QCon London 2025
Podcast ⸱ Jan 26, 2026 ⸱ 00h 58m 00stldl: This podcast is about making decisions with imperfect/unclear information and why you almost never throw away working code as the system grows. I recommend listening this one if you have ever wondered how to steer a messy early architecture without rewriting everything :)
“How S3 is built” from The Pragmatic Engineer
Podcast ⸱ Jan 21, 2026 ⸱ 01h 18m 14stldl: S3 is one of the biggest distributed systems around (if not the biggest!), and this talk explains how it hits durability and availability across millions of servers, why it assumes failure by default. Watch it if you want to learn about large scale systems tradeoffs.
📆 New talks
Here’s the complete list of all the talks published since the last issue, grouped by conference, and ordered by number of views for your convenience.
📆 New podcasts
Here’s the complete list of all the podcasts published since the last issue.
🗄️ New talks & podcasts by category
All the items from 📆 New talks and 📆 New podcasts organized by category.
📈 Most-watched talks
Find the most watched talks from the past 7d, 30d, 90d, 6m, and 12m:
Found something useful? Hit the ❤️ or leave a comment. Thank you 🙏
Enjoy the weekend ☀️ and see you next week!
This is exaclty the kind of curation I need. The talk about building a serverless DB on S3 by ditching MongoDB caught my eye—you rarely get to hear about those big architecture pivots and the real tradeoffs behind them. Most conference content stays surface-level, but tracking down the ones that dive into production lessons and "what we'd do diffrent" is gold.