practice

A CBC The National investigation into Apple's business practices, including undercover work on repair pricing and the battery slowdown scandal. It examines allegations of overpriced repairs and misdiagnosis.

A Google Tech Talk by Steve Weis that introduces modern cryptography and its use in practice and at Google. It covers proofs of security and security definitions and a special topic. HN commenters treat it as a talk on verifiable electronic voting.

Rich Hickey's Clojure Conj 2023 talk on design in practice, covering problem statements, decision matrices, choosing precise words and making decisions in a team.

Pete Hunt of Facebook and Instagram introduces React at JSConf EU 2013 and explains its design principles. He argues that separating templates from logic only separates technologies, not concerns, and makes the case for components.

Pete Hunt of Facebook and Instagram presents React at JSConf.Asia 2013, explaining its design principles and why they seemed shocking at first. He argues that React separates concerns rather than technologies, and the talk also announces the React Chrome developer tools.

Joseph White, creator of PICO-8, retraces the design of the fantasy console and how tools can shape and guide creative work. He discusses cozy, constrained design spaces and the influence of user-made cartridges.

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.

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.

Veritasium examines which experts have real expertise, drawing on chess research and work by Klein and Kahneman. It explains that expertise comes from pattern recognition built through deliberate practice in valid, feedback-rich environments.

Felienne Hermans's Strange Loop keynote on the history and pedagogy of teaching programming. She questions exploration-only approaches like Logo and discusses research supporting explicit instruction and rote practice.

Two Google engineers perform a mock coding interview and then discuss best practices for candidates, including asking clarifying questions and communicating while solving.

Bertrand Meyer's ACM webcast giving a critical look at agile methods, separating good ideas from hype and from practices he thinks damage projects. It is based on his book on the same subject.

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.

Kai Lentit's comedy sketch parodying an interview with an agile coach, lampooning scrum, sprints and kanban jargon. It is a few minutes of programmer humor.

John Romero's 2016 GDC Europe talk recounts the early days of id Software and the programming principles behind Doom and Quake, including fast iteration and keeping the game bootable.

Erik Meijer gives a provocative talk presenting what he calls a rational alternative to Agile, arguing against Scrum-style practice. He also touches on the tenth-man concept.

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.

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.

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2016 talk on how software engineers pass knowledge down through oral tradition, from folk rhymes to programmer lore and stories like why C lacks a logical XOR. He argues for writing software with future generations in mind.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, discusses the hard parts of running an open source project: online community conflict, why its patterns arise, and a cultural history of open source. He offers ideas for more civil, productive communication.

Austin Meyer, developer of the X-Plane flight simulator, explains how he was sued by a patent troll over a trivial claim about an app's license server. He walks through how the shell-company litigation works and why ignoring the suit makes things worse.

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.

Chris Granger, creator of Light Table and the Eve language, gives a Berkeley data science lecture on what computation and programming might look like in ten years. He covers the path that led to Eve and ends with demos.

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.

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.

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.

Robert Martin's RailsConf 2009 talk looks at why Smalltalk lost out despite its technical strengths. He draws lessons about language communities and arrogance that he argues could hurt Ruby too.