Monktoberfest 2016: Bryan Cantrill - Oral Tradition in Software Engineering

What Hacker News said

Strong rec thundergolfer · 2022-06 · on “The Documentation Triangle, or, why code isn't self documenting”

Oral Tradition in Software Engineering[1] by Bryan Cantrill really helped me appreciate that long comments in code can be a treasured part of a software space. I started my career in a pretty low-comment Ruby codebase, but now count myself as a person partial to adding lengthy 'why not how' commentary in programs. 1. [this video]

Strong rec OmarAssadi · 2022-08 · on “The Story of Mel (1983)”

I’m surprised I haven’t seen this linked yet, but Bryan Cantrill of dtrace, Sun, lawnmower, Joyent, etc, fame gave an amazing talk for Monktoberfest 2016, titled “Oral Tradition in Software Engineering”, which features The Story of Mel [1]. Highly recommend checking it out — there are loads of little gems and stories like this throughout. All of his other presentations are great too and definitely worth a listen if you like this sort of thing [2]. A couple of my favorites are “Fork Yeah! The Rise and Development of Illumos” [3] and “Debugging Under Fire: Keep your Head when Systems have Lost their Mind” [4]. [1]: [this video] [2]: [LINK] [3]: [LINK] [4]: [LINK]

Recommends secstate · 2019-04 · on “Back in the Day: Unix, Minix and Linux”

I love historical pieces about technology. There's so much new and shiny all the time in tech, it's nice to reflect on where we've been. Makes me want to re-watch Bryan's talk at Monktoberfest a few years ago on oral tradition in tech: [this video]

Recommends thristian · 2020-04 · on “WhyTheName”

You may be interested in this 2016 talk about oral history in software engineering: [this video] To oversimplify: we should write more interesting and historical comments in our codebases, write more blog posts and give more talks, and share more links to blog posts and talks other people have created.

Recommends jjice · 2025-02 · on “XOR”

One of my favorite XOR stories is from Bryan Cantrill (of Oxide, Joyent, and Sun) in this presentation [0] and this video [1]. To avoid clicking a link: When he was at Sun, he was chatting with a coworker (Roger Faulkner) about the lack of logical XOR in C. Faulkner said it was because you couldn't short circuit it, and Brian thought that was wild. Then Roger emailed Dennis Ritchie to ask and he confirmed it was what Faulkner had said. That stories gets me every time! First of all, it's very funny and well delivered by Cantrill, but it's also just so incredible that they could ask the man himself. [0] [LINK] [1] [this video]

Recommends shagie · 2026-01 · on “The Jeff Dean Facts”

As I write this, catb is not serving promptly... so [LINK] I also recommend Monktoberfest 2016: Bryan Cantrill - Oral Tradition in Software Engineering : [this video]

Cites Annatar · 2016-12 · on “Building and Linking Libraries in C”

Oh, where is the officially sanctioned definition of the meaning and intent of a header? So glad you asked: The C Programming language, 2nd edition, page 82, chapter "FUNCTIONS AND PROGRAM STRUCTURE", as follows: "There is one more thing to worry about--the definitions and declarations shared among the files. As much as possible, we want to centralize this, so that there is only one copy to get right and keep right as the program evolves. Accordingly, we will place this common material in a header file , calc.h, which will be included as necessary." [this video]

Cites tephra · 2023-03 · on “Gordon Moore, Intel Co-Founder, Dies at 94”

This made me immediately think of "The bug count also rises" [LINK] and of course Bryan Cantrills reading of it: [this video]