There are a few lectures you should not miss - this is one of them.  It is about the tasks that you do before starting to code. 

Who is Leslie Lamport? 

I can do no better than quote from the announcement of the lecture:

"Dr. Lamport received a doctorate in mathematics from Brandeis University, with a dissertation on singularities in analytic partial differential equations. This, together with a complete lack of education in computer science, prepared him for a career as a computer scientist at Massachusetts Computer Associates, SRI, Digital, and Compaq. He claims that it is through no fault of his that of those four corporations, only the one that was supposed to be non-profit still exists. He joined Microsoft in 2001, but that company has not yet succumbed."

To be slightly more accurate, he is currently with Microsoft Research.

The brief bio goes on to say:

"More recently, Dr. Lamport has been annoying computer scientists and engineers by urging them to understand an algorithm or system before implementing it, and scaring them by saying they should use mathematics. In an attempt to get him to talk about other things, the ACM gave him the 2013 Turing Award."

Which is something you might have read about last year on I Programmer. 

You can see that he might have something interesting to say and the Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium gave him  the chance to talk about "Programming Should Be More Than Coding". I should say that if you are up on math and know about functional programming you might not find what he has to say surprising: 

It is worth mentioning that the seminar series provides a new lecture on computer systems every week. You can find a list of videos already available to view at Colloquium on Computer Systems. 

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