I’ve been spending some of my spare time recently trawling youtube looking for lightning talks from unix/devops conferences. Lightning talks have the advantage that you can skip through presenters or topics you’re not interested in, and from time to time you find a presenter or a topic which tickles you.

Top of my list this week is Bryan Cantrill (Used to work for Sun, now works for Joyent) presenting at Surge, which is described on the conference website as “Now in its fourth year, Surge has become the conference on scalability and performance engineering.”

Bryan clearly knows his stuff, and is a very entertaining speaker. Each of these talks is about 15 minutes long, but they’re at the end of each video.

Surge 2012: Two unix commands you’ve probably never heard of, and certainly don’t use
The sound is a bit ropey at the beginning of the 2012 talk, but gets better when he works out how to switch his mic on.

Surge 2013: “tail -f”

If you’ve got any other tips for videos of talks (lightning or otherwise) that you think I should watch, drop a link in the comments and I’ll add them to my playlist of “things to watch while I spend my evenings working on other things“