You've Got a Backlog of Conference Talks and No Idea Where to Start

You've bookmarked dozens of conference talks with every intention of watching them, and somehow the tab count keeps growing while the watch count stays at zero. The problem isn't that good JavaScript talks don't exist—it's that finding the ones worth your evening is its own project. Must-Watch JavaScript is a hand-picked list that does that filtering for you.

What It Does

Must-Watch JavaScript is a curated collection of well-received talks about JavaScript, organized by year and covering topics like React, functional programming, performance, frameworks, debugging, tooling, and more. Each entry gives you the talk title, a link to the video, the speaker's name, the conference or channel it came from, and the runtime—so you know whether you're committing to 20 minutes or two hours before you click.

The list spans from 2016 through 2026, and it's maintained as a plain markdown README on GitHub. There's no app, no database, no build step—just a single file you can read, star, or fork. The repo also links to contribution guidelines for anyone who wants to suggest additions, and points CSS enthusiasts toward a sibling list, Must-Watch CSS.

Why It's Cool

• The runtime is right there. Every entry lists its duration, like 18:23 or 2:12:04. That sounds like a small thing until you realize it's the difference between "I'll watch this at lunch" and "I'll save this for a weekend." It's a small detail that shows the list was built by someone who actually watches talks.

• It's opinionated by design. This isn't a dump of every JavaScript talk ever recorded. It's a hand-picked list, and the years with just one or two entries are as telling as the years with five. Someone decided these were the ones worth your time, and that editorial restraint is the whole value proposition.

• The range is wider than you'd expect. You get big-picture performance talks like Rich Harris on fine-grained reactivity and Jim Dummett on Oxc, the Rust-based JavaScript tooling. You also get practical debugging sessions (Jenn Creighton on async JS, Rebecca Hill on debugging tools), browser internals (Jake Archibald's "In the Loop" on the event loop), and genuinely odd experiments—Charlie Gerard controlling JavaScript with her brain, Ania Kubów teaching JavaScript by building Mario over two hours. The mix keeps the list from feeling like a single conference's greatest hits.

• The classics are still here. Ryan Dahl's "10 Things I Regret About Node.js" from 2018, Wes Bos on async/await from 2017, Anjana Vakil on immutable data structures—these are the talks people still reference years later, and having them in one place next to newer material is handy.

• It's low-friction. No signup, no newsletter gate, no video player. It's a README. You open it, you pick something, you watch it on YouTube. That's the entire interaction model, and it's the right one.

How to Try It

There's nothing to install. The list lives entirely in the repository's README:

1. Head to github.com/allthingssmitty/must-watch-javascript.
2. Scroll to the year you're in the mood for—or start at the top for the newest entries.
3. Pick a talk based on topic and runtime, then click through to the video.
4. Star the repo so it's easy to find next time you have a spare half hour.

If you want to suggest a talk, check the Contribution Guidelines linked in the README before opening a pull request. And if CSS is more your thing, the README points you to Must-Watch CSS.

Final Thoughts

This isn't a tool you integrate into your workflow—it's a reading list, and its value depends entirely on the taste behind it. The curation here is solid and the year-by-year structure makes it easy to browse without getting overwhelmed. It's best for developers who learn well from talks but don't want to wade through conference archives to find the good ones. If you've been meaning to catch up on the JavaScript talks everyone keeps mentioning, this is a reasonable place to start—and a good excuse to finally close some of those tabs.