code review

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.

A DevOps YouTuber tests GitHub Copilot on a range of Leetcode problems and finds it solves most immediately, with a few needing tweaks and some far off. He concludes it would outperform him in a FAANG-style interview.

Blizzard's Timothy Ford explains in this 2017 GDC session how Overwatch uses an Entity Component System architecture for layered gameplay. He also covers its server-authoritative netcode with client-side prediction and how they keep the game responsive and fair.

SethBling uses Super Mario World glitches to inject and run Flappy Bird code on an unmodified SNES, entering it purely with controller inputs. It was the first time a human completed this kind of exploit by hand.

Casey Muratori shows how typical 'clean code' object-oriented patterns can cost large factors in performance. He benchmarks them against simpler data-oriented code.

CGP Grey explains that postal codes are routing instructions for mail rather than geographic regions. He looks at the quirks and problems this causes.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Pokemon Yellow by MrWint that uses arbitrary code execution to push Game Boy hardware to its limits. Through crafted inputs it injects code and ends up running other programs, such as Tetris, inside the game.

3Blue1Brown's discovery-oriented introduction to error correction codes, building up Hamming codes from the puzzle of locating a flipped bit. It explains the parity-check idea and why it is so efficient.

MattKC fits a playable Snake game into a QR code by writing tiny x86 machine code and patching the ZBar scanner so it can run the decoded data.

OpenAI's 2021 live demo of Codex translating natural language into code, from Hello World to building a game and a Microsoft Word plugin.

Ned Batchelder's PyCon 2012 talk gives a quick overview of what Unicode is, then focuses on what a Python programmer needs to handle text correctly. It presents the 'Unicode sandwich' strategy: decode bytes at input, work with Unicode internally, encode at output.

Marques Brownlee reviews the Humane AI Pin and calls it the worst product he has reviewed, arguing almost no one should buy it. He explains why smartphones still beat it as a daily carry device.

HDTVTest reviews the Apple Pro Display XDR using measurements and a side-by-side comparison with a Sony BVM-HX310 dual-layer LCD reference monitor. It examines how well the display handles HDR against a professional reference.

MKBHD reviews the Fisker Ocean electric SUV and concludes it is the worst car he has reviewed, going through its many problems. He warns viewers not to buy this version of the car.

A short 1966 propaganda interview clip in which Jeremiah Denton, a US prisoner of war in Vietnam, blinks the word TORTURE in Morse code. Naval Intelligence later decoded the message.

Veritasium builds a QR code by hand to explain how it works. It covers the history of Morse code and barcodes, how QR codes encode data, why damaged codes still scan, and how safe they are.

A WSJ investigation by Joanna Stern into iPhone thieves who watch victims enter their passcode, then use it to lock them out of Apple accounts and drain bank and payment apps. It explains how the thefts work and how to protect yourself.

A sketch from the Seattle comedy show Almost Live! in which Pat Cashman plays a US Bell rep explaining the new 425 area code. It first aired in 1997.

A short video that reads out comments from the leaked Team Fortress 2 source code to show the frustration of Valve's programmers over time.

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.

Elm creator Evan Czaplicki's talk on how a file grows and when to split code up. He argues for keeping code in one file until it hurts and warns against premature extraction.

Robert 'Uncle Bob' Martin speaks at Yale School of Management about clean, well-written code and what makes good software development. The talk covers his views on OOP, architecture and professional practice.

Michael Feathers' GOTO Chicago 2018 talk on reducing error checks and conditional logic in code. He offers a framework for handling errors and decisions at the level of code and architecture.

A long Tsoding Daily programming stream in which he implements hot code reloading in C by loading a dynamic library at runtime without stopping the main program. It also touches on migrating struct versions across reloads.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how Unicode and UTF-8 grew out of messy older character encodings to become the web's standard. It covers why the design works and how it handles worldwide text.

A DEF CON 29 talk by Richard Henderson about encoding the EICAR antivirus test string into QR codes and barcodes and scanning them at real systems. Many systems that do not expect such input misbehave or collapse, including a parking garage system.

Adam Savage's Tested spends a week with the Magic Leap One developer kit. They dig into the hardware, display technology, user experience and launch apps.

Louis Rossmann lays out evidence that a Yelp salesperson had friends leave negative reviews of his repair shop after he declined advertising. He frames it as extortion and defamation.

8-Bit Show And Tell walks through the BASIC source code of the original Commodore 64 Sid Meier's Pirates!. It covers bugs, quirks and traces of abandoned features and scenarios left in the code.

A profane video review in the Your Product Sucks series that picks apart the Apple Music app on macOS Catalina and its usability problems.

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.

Matthias Wandel tests old and new code on a range of PCs, including a new mini PC, to measure how much faster modern hardware really is. He also shows optimization techniques such as branchless code, with benchmark programs on GitHub.

Misko Hevery's Clean Code Talk shows how to use object-oriented techniques such as polymorphism to remove repeated if and switch statements. The result is code that is easier to test, understand and maintain.

A short demo of Code Bubbles, an IDE interface built around editable code fragments in bubbles instead of files. It was a research prototype for Java development.

Day 21 of Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, which covers loading game code dynamically from a DLL on Windows. He builds hot reloading of C game code from scratch in about an hour and a half.

Linus Tech Tips reviews the first Framework Laptop, a fully repairable and upgradeable machine. The reviewer expected a flimsy chunky device and was happily surprised.

Casey Muratori's invited lecture on where bad code comes from, rebroadcast from a Twitch stream. He critiques conventional wisdom such as SOLID and Clean Code and argues about how those habits lead to slow, poorly structured software.

A fan-made music video for Jonathan Coulton's song 'Code Monkey', about the life of a programmer, using World of Warcraft footage. It was made by Mike Spiff Booth.

A tool-assisted speedrun of Super Mario World that achieves arbitrary code execution through frame-precise controller inputs, finishing in 2:25. It was also performed live on real hardware at AGDQ 2014.

A live performance at AGDQ 2014 in which Super Mario World is made to execute arbitrary injected code, running other games like Pong and Snake on the cartridge. It is done through a TASBot feeding precise controller inputs.