dev tools

Saqib Shaikh, a blind developer at Microsoft, shows at Build 2017 how he writes and debugs code in Visual Studio using a screen reader. This version adds subtitles.

TJ DeVries coins the term PDE (Personalized Development Environment) to describe editors like Neovim that you shape to your own workflow. He contrasts this with out-of-the-box IDEs and discusses why customizable tools appeal to developers.

Jack Rusher's Strange Loop 2022 talk argues that most programming languages are still designed around punchcard-era assumptions. He makes the case for live, interactive programming environments, drawing on Lisp, Smalltalk and REPL-driven development.

Jeremy Howard defends Jupyter notebooks as a serious development environment, especially when paired with nbdev. He responds directly to Joel Grus's talk about why he dislikes notebooks, and contrasts REPL-style and notebook-style work.

Allan Blomquist demonstrates the internal programming and debugging tools Tomorrow Corporation uses to make games, including live modification of a running game and time-travel debugging.

Casey Muratori gives a fast tour of the RemedyBG debugger for Windows, which he uses daily. He shows its speed and features, especially the watch window.

The Godot Engine 2022 showreel of apps and tools built with Godot, with a timestamped list of each project. It shows the engine being used well beyond games.

David Nolen explains how ClojureScript is used at Vouch.io to build mobile and web software with a single language and REPL-driven workflow. The talk includes a live coding demo of React Native development.

Steve Yegge records himself working in Emacs and shows off about a dozen features in a roughly 45-minute screen capture. It is an informal, enthusiastic tour rather than a structured tutorial.

A short parody sketch of a job interview with a senior JavaScript developer, poking fun at the JS ecosystem and trendy stacks.

People Make Games investigates how Roblox relies on young, often child, developers to build its content while paying them very little. It covers Roblox's monetization model, the revenue split, and the harms to kids who make games on the platform.

Mitchell Hashimoto walks through his setup for running a NixOS virtual machine on a Mac as his development environment, with a config repo on GitHub.

Internet of Bugs analyzes Cognition's Devin demo frame by frame, arguing the video did not show Devin completing paid Upwork jobs as claimed, and showing what the task required versus what Devin produced.

Rich Harris's Svelte Summit 2020 talk on what a modern web development workflow could look like. It announced that Sapper would give way to what became SvelteKit.

A comedy sketch by Kai Lentit in which a senior JavaScript developer is interviewed, parodying the chaos of the JavaScript ecosystem.

Casey Muratori responds on-stream to a dismissive Twitter post by demonstrating how slow Visual Studio's startup and debugger watch window are, comparing it to much older software and machines. It is a long rant about software performance and bloat.

CodeParade's short devlog on how spherical geometry looks in 2D and 3D and why it feels so unusual, part of the Hyperbolica series on a non-Euclidean game.

A fasterthanlime video essay arguing that GitHub Actions is a poorly designed system, with a history of personal computing and CI, and a look at how it works behind the scenes. It is sponsored by Brilliant.

A design essay on why products designed in Western contexts often fail when deployed in developing countries. It covers expert blindness and cultural assumptions, with examples such as malaria nets and the One Laptop Per Child project.

NASASpaceflight's 24/7 live stream from SpaceX's Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, showing Starship and Super Heavy development, testing and launches.

A Lex Fridman podcast conversation with the four creators of Cursor, the AI-assisted code editor. They discuss how the editor integrates models into programming workflows, including custom completion models and techniques like speculative decoding to speed up applying edits.

Dwarkesh Patel interviews Andy Matuschak on how he learns, why memorization matters for understanding, and why most learning tools fail. The conversation also covers handling confusion and the role of tutoring.

A five-minute demo of the Common Lisp debugger fixing a bug, recompiling a single function, and resuming execution from the failed stack frame. It shows how to avoid re-running long computations.

GitHub interviews Linus Torvalds on twenty years of Git, from its creation in about ten days as a Linux kernel tool to its role in modern software development. He discusses technical decisions, community contributions and the project's philosophy.

A five-minute C-SPAN clip of Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath testifying to a US Senate committee that screen time, including in schools, harms children's learning and cognitive development.

A short extended clip of Steve Ballmer sweating and chanting "developers" on stage at a .NET presentation around 1999 or 2000.

Yegor Denisov-Blanch of Stanford presents a study of nearly 100,000 developers at hundreds of companies, measuring how AI affects productivity from commit data. It finds an average boost of about 20% with wide variance by codebase, task complexity and stack.

David Guillot describes how his team replaced a two-year-old React UI of their SaaS product with Django templates and htmx in a couple of months. The talk gives concrete indicators on code size, performance and team impact.

DHH's opening keynote at Rails World 2024 in Toronto, where Rails 8 beta shipped. It covers built-in authentication, Propshaft, Solid Cache, Solid Queue, Solid Cable, Kamal 2 and Thruster, pitching the One Person Framework that needs no PaaS.

A short video built around Douglas Crockford, creator of JSON, saying JavaScript is a flawed language and that developers should eventually move on from it. It is a brief commentary clip with little technical detail.

John Ousterhout's Netdev 0x16 keynote arguing that nearly every aspect of TCP is wrong for the datacenter, from connections and streams to reliable delivery and congestion control. He presents the case for a replacement protocol.

Valve's two-hour documentary for Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary, with team members discussing development, nearly running out of money, being hacked, the publisher lawsuit and the birth of Steam.

Greg Wilson surveys what empirical research actually shows about software development, why we believe it, and how to share that knowledge more widely. It covers evidence on practices such as TDD and design patterns.

A roughly 3.7-hour Lex Fridman podcast with Pieter Levels, the solo developer behind over 40 startups. They discuss programming, viral AI products, indie hacking and digital nomad life.

DIY Perks shows how to modify devices that use older USB connectors so they charge and connect over USB Type-C. He solders in a USB-C connector board and works through cases such as dongle-dependent gadgets and a mouse receiver.

Kevin Fang comically retells GitLab's 2017 incident in which an engineer deleted the production database, based on the company's postmortems. It walks through the confusion and failed backups.

A clip of John Carmack on the Lex Fridman podcast discussing his programming setup, why he favors debuggers and IDEs, and his puzzlement at developers who avoid them.

A parody interview with a fanatical Vim user, mocking editor-loyalty culture. It is a short programmer-humor sketch from Kai Lentit.

Kai Lentit's comedy sketch parodies a retro documentary interview with an Emacs enthusiast, joking about Emacs's endless configuration and devotion.

Aaron Francis walks through how PHP has changed from 2012 to 2023, covering traits, array destructuring, generators, typed properties and more. It is a quick chaptered tour of modern PHP features.