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    13 videos · 11 hr 9 min
    Playlists

    Talks every programmer should watch

    Curated by HackerTube · 13 videos · 11 hr 9 min

    These are the talks that turn up in thread after thread when someone asks what every programmer should see. None of them is a language tutorial. The list starts with Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy, then moves through design and APIs, everyday code craft and testing, ways of thinking, and working with other people. It ends with two wider looks at the state of software.

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    1. 1
      1:01:39

      "Simple Made Easy" - Rich Hickey (2011)

      Strange Loop Conference · 220K views · 5 years ago

      The place to start: Hickey's split between simple (not intertwined) and easy (familiar) gives you a vocabulary for complexity that the rest of this list keeps using, and HN calls it a must-watch even if you never touch Clojure.

    2. 2
      1:01:40

      A Philosophy of Software Design | John Ousterhout | Talks at Google

      Talks at Google · 548K views · 8 years ago

      Ousterhout's hour on deep modules and managing complexity is HN's standard short version of his book, and a practical companion to Hickey's ideas.

    3. 3
      1:00:19

      How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters

      Google TechTalks · 453K views · 19 years ago

      Joshua Bloch treats every programmer as an occasional API designer, and HN has called this the best resource on the subject since 2011.

    4. 4
      38:47

      RailsConf 2014 - All the Little Things by Sandi Metz

      Confreaks · 190K views · 12 years ago

      Moving from design to the code itself, Metz refactors a tangle of conditionals into small objects and explains why duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction.

    5. 5
      25:06

      "Making Impossible States Impossible" by Richard Feldman

      elm-conf · 63K views · 10 years ago

      A short talk on shaping your data so that whole classes of bugs cannot happen; the examples are in Elm, but HN commenters say the ideas carry over to any typed language.

    6. 6
      45:55

      Ruby Conf 12 - Boundaries by Gary Bernhardt

      Confreaks · 58K views · 13 years ago

      The talk that introduced 'functional core, imperative shell', which HN recommends as a practical answer to how to test code without mocking everything.

    7. 7
      1:03:55

      🚀 TDD, Where Did It All Go Wrong (Ian Cooper)

      DevTernity Conference · 619K views · 8 years ago

      Cooper goes back to Kent Beck's original idea of testing behaviour rather than implementation details, and many commenters say it changed how they write tests.

    8. 8
      39:49

      Hammock Driven Development - Rich Hickey

      ClojureTV · 333K views · 13 years ago

      From code to thinking: Hickey's case for stepping away from the keyboard and letting your background mind solve the problem, which HN treats as permission to think before you type.

    9. 9
      54:20

      Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle

      Rui Oliveira · 339K views · 14 years ago

      Victor's live demos of tools that show results as you type, plus his argument for organising your work around a principle, left one commenter writing that it blew their mind.

    10. 10
      53:31

      Growing a Language, by Guy Steele

      Bill Pugh · 165K views · 14 years ago

      Steele makes his point about extensible languages by giving the talk in one-syllable words plus terms he defines as he goes, and HN calls it perhaps the best talk ever on the topic.

    11. 11
      55:17

      Google I/O 2009 - The Myth of the Genius Programmer

      Google for Developers · 1.2M views · 17 years ago

      Software is a team sport: Fitzpatrick and Collins-Sussman make the case for humility, code review and sharing work early, and HN readers call it career-shaping.

    12. 12
      45:50

      "The Mess We're In" by Joe Armstrong

      Strange Loop Conference · 398K views · 12 years ago

      Erlang's co-creator gives a funny, opinionated tour of why software got so tangled, which HN still finds accurate years later.

    13. 13
      1:02:42

      Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)

      DevGAMM · 316K views · 7 years ago

      The widest view to end on: Blow argues that knowledge gets lost between generations and that software quality is already slipping, and his talk is the usual link in HN threads on software decay.