legacy code

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Timothy Daly, an original author of the Axiom computer algebra system, talks about turning a large Common Lisp codebase into a literate program. He argues code should be written as readable manuals, and the talk was given at Write the Docs 2013.

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.

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.

Walter Bright explains to the Northwest C++ Users Group how the D programming language can interface directly with legacy C++ code. He covers why C++ is hard to interface with and how D approaches the problem.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A short !!Con 2016 talk by blind developer Sina Bahram on how he uses a computer and writes code with a screen reader at about 1,000 words per minute. He plays how common interfaces sound and challenges the audience to go a day using only the keyboard.

Brian Will follows up his earlier anti-OOP video by walking through four short code examples, including Java code in the style of Uncle Bob, to show how object-oriented design complicates simple programs. It argues that OOP hides and scatters state and adds needless indirection.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, gives an elm-conf 2016 talk on the non-code side of building a language. It covers the philosophy behind Elm's development approach, including batching work and the priorities of different language communities.

Jon Gjengset spends about three hours livecoding complex changes in a Rust codebase with agentic AI tools, testing his hypothesis that AI is weak at non-pattern work. He documents where Claude Code helps and where it struggles.