I love Rob Pike’s talks: face-paced and intense. It’s a nice change from the typical talks about programming: slow, and often more about self-promotion than teaching.

I usually feel I miss a few things here and there when I listen to Rob, he’s smart and expect you to be smart, he doesn’t talk down to you. I rarely understand everything perfectly: this is good, it means I don’t fully master the subject, it means I’m learning, it means he’s making a good use of my time.

This talk about implementing a bignum calculator is the perfect example, Rob doesn’t spend much time reading and explaining the code or the examples: he assumes that his audience is smart enough to understand the most of the details; he focuses on the big picture, and the hard details.