Category Theory for the Working Hacker. Philip Wadler, one of the most important computer scientists in existence, a person who is extremely well known within Haskell community, and a (falsely attributed) author of the quote “A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what’s the issue?” explains what is that that we all, as practicing programmers, need to know about category theory, while nicely illustrating his talk with slides full of handwritten code.

I personally think that category theory is a very promising direction to consider when finding ways to build very large software systems from modules. My intuition about it is that on a meta-language level it offers a very useful parardigm, which is absolutely comparable in expressive power with the “code as data” paradigm of Lisp, or “code as expression” paradigm of APL-derived languages. I’ll try to elaborate on that in one of the future posts, but you can watch the video straight away.

The Secret Life of SIM Cards. This is a video on security, which is normally not the topic I deal with, but this talk is particularly fascinating because it talks about “an OS within an OS within an OS” — a software running on a SIM card, which interacts with the baseband (another specialized operating system), which, in turn, interacts with the main operating system of the phone.