💥 Tech Talks Weekly #69: "Does AI Actually Boost Developer Productivity?"
150+ new recordings across 18 conferences
Happy Wednesday 👋
Warm welcome to Tech Talks Weekly #69! This issue features all the Software Engineering talk recordings published since the last one on July 23rd.
There’s tons of fantastic content to watch, so I highly recommend opening it in a browser by clicking the 💥 post title at the top. Additionally, some of my readers prefer to use Youtube “Watch later” playlist or Raindrop.io to bookmark the talks.
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Now, let’s jump right in!
🏆 Featured talks of the week
Here are our top recommendations this week. Make sure to watch or bookmark!
"Does AI Actually Boost Developer Productivity? (100k Devs Study) - Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Stanford" ⸱ +85k views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 18m 12s
tldw: The speaker shares findings from a study of nearly 100,000 developers. Factors like task complexity, project maturity, and language popularity influence the impact. For simple tasks, AI shines, but it can decrease productivity for complex ones. Larger codebases also see diminishing returns. The speaker shares some interesting numbers I haven’t included in this summary, so I highly encourage you to watch this talk.
"Can We Measure Developer Productivity? | Eberhard Wolff (EN)" ⸱ +100 views ⸱ 25 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 47m 18s
tldw: You’ll see whether we can measure developer productivity and if we should. The speaker discusses issues with different types of metrics which can be misleading. He mentions gambling or manipulation of metrics, known as Goodhart's law, where a measure becomes ineffective if used as a target.
"Jesus Espino - Exploring a complex codebase with AI" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 47m 23s
tldw: You’ll learn how to use AI to decode complex codebases like the Go runtime and compiler. You'll learn how AI tools can streamline understanding by breaking down complex structures, providing easy to understand explanations, and generating helpful diagrams.
"Full-stack forms with JSON Schemas - Sandrina Pereira | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ +100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 24m 33s
tldw: You’ll learn how to simplify web form maintenance with JSON Schemas, making them the single source of truth for both server and client-side applications. You’ll see how JSON schemas reduce duplication in form structure and validation and offer cross-platform compatibility.
"Alina Yurenko - From CLIs to LLMs: 5 cool applications to build with GraalVM" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 48m 25s
tldw: Alina’s talk explores five different applications you can build using GraalVM, specifically focusing on the native images. You'll learn how to create fast CLI and fullstack apps that combine Java with GraalVM's performance optimizations.
"Bert Jan Schrijver - Generic or Specific? Making sensible software design decisions" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 51m 20s
tldw: The speaker explores factors like code reuse, project requirements, and organizational challenges. The talk introduces concepts like coupling, strategic design, and the rule of three to guide these decisions. Emphasizing simplicity, the speaker argues that flexibility doesn't always equate to complexity.
"Advanced "Java 101" | Nicolai Parlog (EN)" ⸱ +200 views ⸱ 28 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 45m 14s
tldw: In this talk, Nikolai explores how Java's historical complexities pose challenges for newcomers today. He discusses Project Amber's recent efforts to simplify Java, like direct code execution and streamlined class interactions.
"Inside GPT – The Maths Behind the Magic • Alan Smith • GOTO 2024" ⸱ +1k views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 41m 21s
tldw: This talk dives into the math and mechanics behind GPT models. You'll learn how algorithms like word embedding, tokenization, and vectorization work. The speaker demonstrates training a GPT2 model to generate song lyrics and explores the capabilities and limits of larger models like ChatGPT and GPT4. You’ll learn about hyperparameters and the nuances of language tokenization.
📆 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.
DevBcn 2025
"Mauricio Salatino - Cloud Native Developer Experience in 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 52m 07s
"Patrik Patel—architect's Guide to Managing a Code Base" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 41m 43s
"Cedric Clyburn - Going from containers, to pods, to Kubernetes – help for developer environments!" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 46m 40s
"Aleix Morgadas - Team Cognitive Load as a metric to measure Platform impact" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 51m 24s
"Gabriele Brambilla - Enhancing User Engagement Through Personalized Recommendation at Dow Jones" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 34m 54s
"Bert Jan Schrijver - Generic or Specific? Making sensible software design decisions" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 51m 20s
"Brian Vermeer - Don't Get Burned! Secure Coding Essentials in Java to protect your application." ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 51m 48s
"Jesus Espino - Exploring a complex codebase with AI" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 47m 23s
"Richard Brough - Aligning DeepSeek R1" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 29m 00s
"Alexandre Touret - Elevating Young Developers: Best practices for seasoned developers on onboardings" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 24m 02s
"Raphael Semeteys&Hajer Mabrouk - The Yoga of Image Generation with Stable DIffusion and ComfyUI" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 51m 41s
"Karina Gibert - The AI boom: what and why?" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 41m 15s
"Iveri Prangishvili & Jose Correa—Scaling Kubernetes Deployments Across +15'000 Namespaces" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 37m 54s
"Philip Miglinci - Mastering Modern Software Distribution: On-Prem, Air-Gapped, and BYOC Challenges" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 50m 00s
"Alvaro Sanchez M - Revealing the magic behind Java annotations" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 50m 13s
"Victor Rentea - Top 10 Rest API Design Pitfalls" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 51m 24s
"Laurent Doguin - 15 years of Database evolution in 20 minutes" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 25m 24s
"Milen Dyankov - AI for Java Developers - From Buzzword to Code" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 52m 02s
"Mario Macias - From PIDs to Pods: our journey to connect eBPF and Kubernetes" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 40m 47s
"Laura Perea - GenAI among us" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 31m 10s
"Jordan Miller - How Nubank leverages Datomic's database as an immutable value to run at scale" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 50m 54s
"Alina Yurenko - From CLIs to LLMs: 5 cool applications to build with GraalVM" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 48m 25s
"Luis Majano - BoxLang: A New Dynamic JVM Language" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 46m 03s
"Devbcn 2025 - Closing Ceremony" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 14m 01s
"Barbara Teruggi - A door with no locks? Let’s talk about threat modeling" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 43m 06s
"Anshika Koul - Kotlin Multiplatform's Cross-Platform Brilliance at Norway's National Postal Service" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 27m 59s
"George Malamidis - Load testing distributed web services" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 46m 42s
"Ana Maria Mihalceanu - Empower Inclusion Through Accessible Java Applications" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 45m 41s
"Isra Chahrazed -The Leaking Bucket: Women in Tech" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 22m 51s
"DevBcn 2025 - Welcome session" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 13m 31s
JSHeroes 2025
"Full-stack forms with JSON Schemas - Sandrina Pereira | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ +100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 24m 33s
"What can we expect of LLMs as software engineers? - Chelsea Troy | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 32m 09s
"Tooling Like It's 2025 - Josh Goldberg | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 32m 02s
"Treat the Compiler With Compassion - Filip Sodic | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 23m 40s
"The code etymologist - Andrei Pfeiffer | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 27m 27s
"JavaScript Streaming - a Qwik Glimpse into an AI Optimized future - Shai Reznik | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 01h 09m 51s
"6 Safe Refactoring's for Untested Legacy Code - Nicolas Carlo | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 28m 53s
"Invisible Hand of React Performance - Ivan Akulov | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 28m 47s
"Lessons in Managing Technical Debt - Emilia Muresan | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 27m 34s
"Security-First Web Apps - Atila Fassina | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 31m 41s
"The latest with Angular - Jessica Janiuk | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 24m 46s
"Scroll-Driven Animations with CSS - Bramus Van Damme | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 36m 04s
"Built-in accessibility: blessing or curse? - Hidde de Vries | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 27m 53s
"Reviving Express: A challenging road for Express 5.0 - Jean Burellier | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 25m 46s
"The hidden framework revolution: the comeback of RPC - Dan Shappir | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 26m 24s
"Cascading Layers of !mportance - Miriam Suzanne | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 33m 44s
"So you’ve decided to do a technical migration - Sophie Koonin | JSHeroes 2025" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 29m 12s
KotlinConf 2025
"That's Unpossible – A full stack side project webapp (including a high-fidelity UI!) all in Kotlin" ⸱ +7k views ⸱ 25 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 36m 19s
"Coroutine Debugging in IntelliJ IDEA | Alexey Merkulov" ⸱ +3k views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 13m 25s
"Kotlin compatibility crash course | Martin Bonnin" ⸱ +2k views ⸱ 28 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 16m 13s
"The wonders of smart casting | Alejandro Serrano Mena" ⸱ +1k views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 15m 36s
"Compose draw speedrun - reloaded | Maia Grotepass" ⸱ +1k views ⸱ 26 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 32m 26s
"Stream Processing Rocks! Stream processing in Kotlin from KStreams to RocksDB" ⸱ +1k views ⸱ 27 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 29m 16s
"Writing Your Third Kotlin Compiler Plugin | Brian Norman" ⸱ +1k views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 35m 28s
JCON EUROPE 2025
"Advanced "Java 101" | Nicolai Parlog (EN)" ⸱ +200 views ⸱ 28 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 45m 14s
"Practical AI in Java | Marcus Hellberg (EN)" ⸱ +200 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 48m 45s
"Can We Measure Developer Productivity? | Eberhard Wolff (EN)" ⸱ +100 views ⸱ 25 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 47m 18s
"Java developer-friendly frontends: Build UIs without the JavaScript hassle | Jago de Vreede (EN)" ⸱ +100 views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 44m 27s
"We Hate Code - The !joy of Maintaining Dead Code | Gerrit Grunwald (EN)" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 26 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 37m 03s
"From Zero to Secured: Jakarta REST with MicroProfile and JWT Authentication | Hanno Embregts (EN)" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 48m 32s
"Himalayan Peaks of Testing Data Pipelines | Pasha Finkelshteyn & Kseniia Tomak (EN)" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 27 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 46m 04s
PyData Yerevan 2025
"Arsine Sarikyan, Levon Chukhajyan - NLP for Product Categorization from Unstructured Data" ⸱ +600 views ⸱ 25 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 46m 24s
CITYJS 2024
"Sweta Tanwar - Mastering TypeScript Mysteries" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 24m 14s
"Gift Egwuenu - Automate the Browser with Workers Browser Rendering API" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 24m 45s
"Anthony Fu - ESLint One for All Made Easy" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 30 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 29m 53s
Optimized AI 2025
"Generative AI - A Pragmatic Business View - Bill Franks" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 28 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 22m 29s
"Beyond RAG: Building Robust Knowledge Frameworks for Complex Multi-document Retrieval for Enterprise" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 28 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 20m 37s
"Revolutionizing Client Inquiry Management with Gen-AI - Lin Zhang" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 28 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 17m 19s
AI Engineer 2025
"Does AI Actually Boost Developer Productivity? (100k Devs Study) - Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Stanford" ⸱ +85k views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 18m 12s
"3 ingredients for building reliable enterprise agents - Harrison Chase, LangChain/LangGraph" ⸱ +16k views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 20m 55s
"Make your LLM app a Domain Expert: How to Build an Expert System — Christopher Lovejoy, Anterior" ⸱ +15k views ⸱ 28 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 19m 18s
"A2A & MCP Workshop: Automating Business Processes with LLMs — Damien Murphy, Bench" ⸱ +12k views ⸱ 26 Jul 2025 ⸱ 01h 23m 14s
"Software Development Agents: What Works and What Doesn't - Robert Brennan, AllHands/OpenHands" ⸱ +12k views ⸱ 25 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 16m 46s
"Structuring a modern AI team — Denys Linkov, Wisedocs" ⸱ +12k views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 17m 40s
"Devin 2.0 and the Future of SWE - Scott Wu, Cognition" ⸱ +11k views ⸱ 25 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 16m 13s
"Building Applications with AI Agents — Michael Albada, Microsoft" ⸱ +9k views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 15m 50s
"Beyond the Prototype: Using AI to Write High-Quality Code - Josh Albrecht, Imbue" ⸱ +9k views ⸱ 25 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 17m 59s
"Building a Smarter AI Agent with Neural RAG - Will Bryk, Exa.ai" ⸱ +7k views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 18m 42s
"POC to PROD: Hard Lessons from 200+ Enterprise GenAI Deployments - Randall Hunt, Caylent" ⸱ +6k views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 19m 16s
"How to build Enterprise Aware Agents - Chau Tran, Glean" ⸱ +6k views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 19m 53s
"Monetizing AI — Alvaro Morales, Orb" ⸱ +5k views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 18m 18s
"How to Build Planning Agents without losing control - Yogendra Miraje, Factset" ⸱ +4k views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 15m 58s
"Ship Production Software in Minutes, Not Months — Eno Reyes, Factory" ⸱ +4k views ⸱ 25 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 16m 06s
"Strategies for LLM Evals (GuideLLM, lm-eval-harness, OpenAI Evals Workshop) — Taylor Jordan Smith" ⸱ +4k views ⸱ 27 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 32m 28s
"Your Coding Agent Just Got Cloned And Your Brain Isn't Ready - Rustin Banks, Google Jules" ⸱ +4k views ⸱ 25 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 13m 40s
"Information Retrieval from the Ground Up - Philipp Krenn, Elastic" ⸱ +2k views ⸱ 27 Jul 2025 ⸱ 01h 48m 07s
"Building Agents (the hard parts!) - Rita Kozlov, Cloudflare" ⸱ +2k views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 21m 12s
QCon San Francisco 2024
"Netflix ML Infra: Stop Bottlenecks! Scale Python Like Never Before" ⸱ +500 views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 49m 00s
GOTO 2024
"Inside GPT – The Maths Behind the Magic • Alan Smith • GOTO 2024" ⸱ +1k views ⸱ 24 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 41m 21s
ACCU 2025
"Contracts for C++ - Timur Doumler - ACCU 2025" ⸱ +1k views ⸱ 23 Jul 2025 ⸱ 01h 31m 42s
"Asynchronous C++ - Dietmar Kühl - ACCU 2025" ⸱ +800 views ⸱ 25 Jul 2025 ⸱ 01h 10m 55s
"A Very Small Language Model - Jez Higgins - ACCU 2025" ⸱ +400 views ⸱ 27 Jul 2025 ⸱ 01h 04m 03s
ElixirConf EU 2025
"Streamlining Development with Ash A Real World Adoption Story Adebisi Adeyeye | ElixirConf EU 2025" ⸱ +400 views ⸱ 29 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 28m 48s
Code BEAM Europe 2024
"SeqEx: Building a MIDI Sequencer with Elixir - Dino Costa | Code BEAM Europe 2024" ⸱ <100 views ⸱ 30 Jul 2025 ⸱ 00h 18m 53s
Enjoy the weekend ☀️ and see you next week!