technical leadership

Tanya Reilly's LeadDev talk on glue work, the invisible coordination and support tasks engineers do that keep teams successful but can hurt careers.

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.

Climber Chris Warner talks at Google about his book on high altitude leadership and the 2007 K2 expedition, where eighteen climbers summited and two died.

Adam Tornhill's GOTO Copenhagen 2019 talk on how to prioritize technical debt in large codebases. It argues for combining code complexity with change frequency (hotspots) from version control data, rather than trying to quantify debt in the abstract.

Derek Sivers annotates a short clip of a lone dancer at a festival, showing how a first follower turns a ridiculous act into a movement. He draws out lessons about leadership and making it easy to follow.

The Futurama clip where Hermes is told he is technically correct, the best kind of correct. It comes from season 2, episode 14.

A demo of writing technical documents in Emacs Org mode using org-babel, so that code blocks and generated content stay consistent when things change. The author shares the demo files and his dotfiles.

Ward Cunningham explains the history and intent of the debt metaphor, which he coined while refactoring the WyCash product. He says debt means code reflecting an incomplete understanding of the problem, not sloppy programming.

Simon Sinek's 99U talk on why leaders earn trust by putting their team's safety ahead of their own, drawing on biology and anthropology. It distills the ideas of his book Leaders Eat Last into about 46 minutes.

In a six-minute TED talk, Derek Sivers uses footage of a dancing man at an outdoor festival to show how a movement starts. He argues the first follower is what turns a lone nut into a leader.

A clip from The Wire (season 4, episode 7) in which a former mayor tells Tommy Carcetti about having to "eat shit" from each constituency during his term. It is a parable about the unpleasant compromises of political leadership.

Simon Sinek's TEDx talk arguing that great leaders and companies inspire action by communicating why they do something before how or what. He uses Apple as his main example.

Simon Sinek's TED talk presents the 'golden circle' model: great leaders and companies inspire action by starting with why they do something, before how or what. He illustrates it with Apple, Martin Luther King, the Wright brothers and, as a counterexample, TiVo.

Sacha Baron Cohen's speech accepting the ADL International Leadership Award, in which he criticizes social media companies for amplifying hate and propaganda. He argues that freedom of speech is not freedom of reach.

Filmmaker Max Joseph's 35-minute video essay asks whether you have to be a jerk to be a successful leader. It draws on Adam Grant's givers and takers, Robert Greene and famous demanding directors.

Daniele Procida's PyCon AU 2017 talk presents a system that divides documentation into four kinds, usually drawn as four quadrants. He explains why mixing them makes docs poor and how separating them improves writing.

Roaring Kitty's July 2020 analysis of GameStop, arguing a bullish deep-value case when the stock was about $4 and short interest exceeded 100%. It covers fundamentals, cash balance and technicals.

Quentin Perret of Google gives a technical deep dive into protected KVM (pKVM) on Arm64, a confidential computing approach for CPUs without hardware extensions. It explains how the nVHE hypervisor manages stage-2 MMU access control to protect guest memory.

Larry McEnerney of the University of Chicago Writing Program gives a graduate-student session on writing effectively. His core idea is that readers care about value to them, not the writer's thinking process.

Larry McEnerney of the University of Chicago Writing Program argues that good writing is defined by what readers value, not by rules or the writer's own ideas. He explains why academic habits fail outside academia and how to write so readers find the work valuable.

A live mock programmer interview in which Casey Muratori interviews game developer Shawn McGrath using a less confrontational format devised by Chris Hecker. It gets deep into technical details while showing how the candidate actually thinks and works.

Nickolas Means tells the story of United Airlines Flight 232, which lost all flight control yet saved more than half its passengers. He draws lessons on teamwork, crew resource management and leadership for software teams.

The earliest filmed version of the Turbo Encabulator technical-jargon parody, shot in the late 1970s with narrator Bud Haggert. It deadpans a stream of meaningless engineering language.

A short clip of Steve Jobs arguing that the best people are self-managing and that professional managers who cannot do the work add little. He says leadership is about a shared vision.

An animated adaptation of Captain David Marquet's talk on greatness, based on his book Turn the Ship Around!. It argues for pushing decision-making down to the people doing the work instead of controlling everything from the top.

A GDC 2015 talk by Arc System Works technical artist Junya Motomura on how Guilty Gear Xrd rebuilt a classic 2D fighter in full 3D while keeping a hand-drawn look. It covers the art and programming R&D and the stylistic decisions behind it.

A short scene from the Amazon series Patriot in which a spy character gives a deadpan, jargon-filled lecture about pipes and nut plate spacing. It is a comedic bit of corporate-cover absurdity.

A short clip of the famous Hitchhiker-style circular narration of a missile guidance system explaining how it knows where it is by knowing where it isn't. It is a deadpan bit of technical-sounding absurdity about subtraction and navigation.

Scene from episode 2 of HBO's Chernobyl in which an official who once ran a shoe factory is put in charge of a critical role. It shows how unqualified appointees end up in charge of technical matters.

Kara Swisher interviews Apple CEO Tim Cook, designer Jony Ive and Laurene Powell Jobs at the 2022 Code Conference. They discuss Apple's history, design, privacy and advertising, and the company's future leadership.

A BBC News clip of Putin pressing Russian foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin to speak clearly during a televised meeting on recognizing the rebel-held Ukrainian regions in February 2022.

Ed Catmull of Pixar speaks at Stanford's 2007 Entrepreneurship Conference on running a creative company. He argues for surfacing small problems early and building good teams, with stories like the Toy Story 2 crunch.

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.

A clip from the 2011 film Margin Call in which senior partners hold an emergency meeting and decide to sell off toxic assets immediately. It is set at the start of the 2008 financial crisis.

The introductory lecture of Richard Hamming's capstone course, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. It focuses on style of thinking and on educating rather than training, using technical material only as illustration.

Moishe Lettvin, a former Google engineer, shares lessons from 250 interviews and his time on the hiring committee. He tells how the committee given anonymized packets, including its own, would hire almost none of them.

Tony Schwartz of The Energy Project speaks at Google about managing energy rather than time. He draws on The Power of Full Engagement and his work on stamina and sustained performance.

A conference presentation by Bert Hubert on how companies lose their technological edge and become outsourcing hubs. It argues the same dynamic applies to whole countries and continents, and ends with suggestions for reversing it.

Thomas Ricks's Nimitz Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley asks why US generals did better in World War II than in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq and Afghanistan. A central point is the WWII practice of quickly reassigning or relieving underperforming generals.

A three-minute clip of Steve Jobs arguing that great products come from people who care about content rather than process. He says process-focused people take over and cause decline, citing IBM as an example.