GOTO Conferences: the videos Hacker News recommends
Not the channel's most viewed videos: the ones HN commenters kept linking with real commentary. The top pick, "The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Sasa Juric • GOTO 2019", it is HN's favorite pitch for Elixir and the BEAM, credited with convincing many people to adopt them.
- 16 HN recommenders 14 months 2019–2024talkIt is HN's favorite pitch for Elixir and the BEAM, credited with convincing many people to adopt them.
- 8 HN recommenders 11 months 2018–2025talkA perennial HN recommendation for outage and postmortem threads, praised as funny, educational and one of the best postmortems anyone has seen.
- 11 HN recommenders 9 months 2016–2026talkOffered in nearly every Agile or Scrum complaint thread as the authoritative take on what agile was meant to be versus what it became.
- 3 HN recommenders 7 months 2017–2020talkTreated as the go-to approachable yet deep primer on CRDTs and collaborative editing, recommended repeatedly in threads on Automerge, local-first software and OT versus CRDT.
- 6 HN recommenders 6 months 2015–2021talkHN repeatedly recommends it as a balanced, beginner-friendly overview of SQL versus NoSQL, and some teachers assign it to students.
- 6 HN recommenders 6 months 2018–2025talkHN considers it one of the best talks for understanding how containers work from the ground up.
- 5 HN recommenders 5 months 2017–2025talkHN commenters point to it whenever Excel, spreadsheets or functional programming come up, as a fun and serious take on spreadsheets as real programming.
- 4 HN recommenders 4 months 2018–2020talkHN recommends it for historical perspective on software ideas and for dispelling myths such as the origins of waterfall.
- 2 HN recommenders 2 months 2020–2023talkHN recommends it as the best talk from Sonic Pi's creator, with live-coding examples and technical and teaching insights.
- 3 HN recommenders 3 months 2016–2023talkOften brought up as an honest account of microservice sprawl, including the fact that nobody at Uber knew exactly how many services existed.
- 3 HN recommenders 2 months 2019–2021talkHN calls it a superb, funny and engaging talk, and links it often after Armstrong's death as one of his best.
- 2 HN recommenders 2 months 2023–2024talkHN commenters cite it as a clear account of the trade-offs between static and dynamic typing and why the industry is swinging back to types.
- 2 HN recommenders 2 months 2018–2021talkHN recommends it for the idea of giving data instead of asking for it, and ties it to zero values and exception-free design.
- 2 HN recommenders 2 months 2018–2022talkRecommended as a conceptual rather than code-heavy talk on failure recovery from Erlang's creator.
- 1 HN recommenders 1 months 2015–2026talkHN commenters list it among the best introductions to event sourcing and use it to illustrate storing read-only events instead of mutating state.
- 1 HN recommenders 1 months 2018–2022talkCited as a useful taxonomy for pinning down what an event-driven design actually is.
- 1 HN recommenders 1 months 2021–2022talkCited as a practical approach to finding the technical debt that matters, and as a reference for codebase visualization.
Questions
Which GOTO Conferences video does Hacker News recommend most?
The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Sasa Juric • GOTO 2019: recommended in 14 different months by 16 HN users between 2019 and 2024.
Is this every GOTO Conferences video?
No. Only videos that at least three different HN users linked, in at least three different months, with at least a sentence of their own commentary. That filter is what makes the list useful.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.