career

A three-minute clip of George Carlin's bit on the American dream, arguing that the owners of the country do not want an educated population capable of critical thinking.

Richard Hamming's 1995 recording of his talk 'You and Your Research', drawn from his graduate engineering course. He discusses how great scientists pick important problems and build careers, drawing on his years at Bell Labs.

The final lecture of Richard Hamming's Learning to Learn course, from 1995, based on his well-known talk 'You and Your Research'. It covers how to do important work and build a career.

TEDxStanford talk by Bill Burnett, executive director of Stanford's design program, on applying design thinking to your own life and career. He offers five practical tips such as getting curious, talking to people and trying things.

Tanya Reilly's LeadDev talk on glue work, the invisible coordination and support tasks engineers do that keep teams successful but can hurt careers.

Clayton Christensen's TEDx talk applying business theory to personal life. He argues that career success is not the right measure of a life and urges attention to relationships and values.

Moishe Lettvin, a former Google engineer, shares lessons from 250 interviews and his time on the hiring committee. He tells how the committee given anonymized packets, including its own, would hire almost none of them.

LearnCode.academy presents a roadmap of web development technologies to learn in 2016 and 2017, spanning front-end, back-end and DevOps tools.

Steve Jobs's 2005 Stanford commencement address, built around three stories: connecting the dots, love and loss including being fired from Apple, and death. It is a 15-minute talk on finding work you love.

The introductory lecture of Richard Hamming's capstone course, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. It focuses on style of thinking and on educating rather than training, using technical material only as illustration.

Mike Rowe, host of Dirty Jobs, shares stories from messy real-world jobs in this TED talk. He argues that hard work has been unjustly degraded in society.

Gary Vaynerchuk's Web 2.0 Expo keynote on building a personal brand in social media. He urges keeping a day job while building something on the side, with passion and persistence, in a loud and profane style.

Alain de Botton gives a TED talk questioning how we define success and failure. He argues that snobbery and the assumption that outcomes are fully earned make career anxiety worse.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) gives a talk on the SOLID principles of object-oriented and agile design, in the context of encapsulation and clean code.

Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman argue that the 'genius programmer' ideal harms collaboration. They advocate trading ego for growth, sharing work early, and understanding how tools shape social behavior.

Tef's EMF 2012 talk on lessons from a career in programming, a candid and humorous look at why programming is so often terrible. Slides and a draft script are available online.

A clip of psychologist Jordan Peterson discussing why few women reach high-paying, high-pressure jobs. He talks about the tension between a demanding career and having a family.

Randy Pausch's 2007 last lecture at Carnegie Mellon, given as he was dying of pancreatic cancer. He reflects on achieving childhood dreams, overcoming obstacles and helping others reach theirs.

A three-minute clip of Jeff Bezos describing his Regret Minimization Framework: imagining yourself at 80 to decide whether to leave a Wall Street job to start Amazon.

A two-minute clip from a 1994 interview with Steve Jobs by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association. Jobs talks about failure and about how most people never ask for help, recalling that he simply called people to ask.

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address, in which he tells three stories from his life about connecting the dots, love and loss, and death. He urges graduates to follow their dreams and find opportunity in setbacks.

Steve Jobs's 2005 Stanford commencement address, in which he tells three stories about connecting the dots, love and loss, and death, including his remarks on typography.

Kevin Rose interviews Chris Sacca, founder of Lowercase Capital, for his Foundation series. The conversation covers Sacca's path in venture capital and angel investing, including his early financial ups and downs.

A five-minute clip from Donald Knuth's Web of Stories interviews in which he gives advice to young people, including being wary when too many people adopt an idea.

Ian Cooper's DevTernity talk revisits Kent Beck's original TDD ideas and shows where misunderstandings crept in. It argues tests should target behaviors through public interfaces rather than implementation details, so suites support refactoring instead of resisting it.

Bret Victor's DBX 2013 talk, delivered in the guise of a 1973 IBM engineer with an overhead projector. It surveys forgotten ideas from 1960s and early 70s computing and warns against assuming you know what you're doing.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) traces the history of software from 1948 to today, looking at the problems programmers faced, how they were solved, and what mistakes the profession made. He then projects where the field is going, including professionalism and regulation.

Tim Ewald's Clojure/conj talk uses furniture making with hand tools versus machine tools as an allegory for software. It explores how automation changes what we make and how we think about our work, and why Clojure's small set of simple tools matters.

Tavis Rudd describes how RSI forced him to program by voice, and shows the Python and Emacs Lisp system he built with voice recognition. A live demo creates and deploys a small system without touching the keyboard.

Raymond Hettinger's PyCon 2013 talk on transforming code into idiomatic Python through a series of before-and-after refactorings. It shows how to use iterators, dictionaries, named tuples and other language features well.

Dave Thomas, a co-author of the Agile Manifesto, argues at GOTO Amsterdam 2015 that Agile as a branded industry has lost its meaning. He says agile is an adjective, not a noun, and urges developers to reclaim agility.

Mirabai Knight's PyCon 2013 talk on Plover, a free cross-platform stenography engine that lets people write at up to 240 WPM on ordinary hardware, including a demo of coding by steno.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, examines how programming languages are funded. He looks at where compiler engineers' salaries come from, why Go has about 5 engineers while Dart has about 30, and how this limits language design.

Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang, gives a funny and opinionated Strange Loop talk on the tangled state of software: build tools, package managers, entropy and the physical limits of computation. He argues for ideas like naming things by content hash and throwing away your first version.

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2017 talk on leadership and organizational principles, ranging from the Gettysburg Address to Uber and Amazon. He argues for the difference between principles and values and criticizes vague corporate principles.

David Beazley's PyCon India closing keynote, in which he live-codes a stack machine and grows it into an interpreter that runs WebAssembly, then uses it to play a Rust-written game. It requires no prior WebAssembly knowledge.

The first lesson of Uncle Bob (Robert C. Martin)'s "Coding Better World Together" series. It makes the case for clean code and for treating software craftsmanship as an ethical and professional responsibility. It runs about 109 minutes.

Greg Baugues tells his story of living with bipolar II and ADHD as a developer at a Ruby conference. He urges openness about mental illness and explains how to get help and support colleagues.

Dylan Beattie's NDC London talk on code written for art, fun and curiosity rather than utility. It includes quines, live music programming with Sonic Pi, and a memorable closing.

Emily Shea explains how repetitive strain injury pushed her to program by voice using speech recognition (Talon), and gives a live coding demo. She argues voice-driven development can be pain-free, efficient and enjoyable.