developer tools

Alex Martelli's Google Developers Day talk on classic design patterns (creational, structural and behavioral) and how they appear in Python. He stresses that patterns must be studied in the context of the implementing language.

Peter Norvig's 2007 Google talk on theorizing from data, covering what huge datasets can do for language understanding, translation, information extraction and inference. It argues that more data often beats cleverer models.

Linus Torvalds gives a Google tech talk on git, the source control system he created two years earlier. He argues for distributed version control over centralized systems such as CVS and Subversion.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk by the creator of Org-mode, introducing the Emacs subsystem for plain-text note-taking and project planning. It covers outlines, TODO states, tags, dates and priorities, and later shows using Org-mode as a spreadsheet.

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 2007 Google Tech Talk in which Bryan Cantrill demonstrates DTrace and explains how it improves debugging of both development and live production systems.

John Allspaw and Paul Hammond's Velocity 09 talk on how Flickr achieved ten or more deploys per day through close cooperation between development and operations.

Vim author Bram Moolenaar's 2007 Google Tech Talk on habits for efficient text editing: find inefficiencies in your own editing, then learn the Vim commands that fix them.

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.

Cal Henderson's DjangoCon 2008 keynote, "Why I Hate Django", is a funny critique of Django from a Flickr architect. It touches on scaling topics such as database replication.

Dan Bornstein's Google I/O 2008 talk on the internals of Dalvik, the virtual machine that runs Android code. It covers the motivation for its design, the dex format and its register-based interpreter, plus tips for writing code that suits the platform.

Kirk McKusick gives a narrative history of BSD from its start at UC Berkeley in the late 1970s through the 1980s releases and the lawsuit that led to 4.4BSD-Lite in 1992. It is full of anecdotes from a key developer.

David Rock gives a Google Tech Talk based on his book Your Brain at Work, using neuroscience to explain why focus and productivity are hard at the office. He gives strategies for managing mental energy and distraction.