Must Read / Must Watch

I thought I'd start a thread of articles and videos that are super high quality for software developers. Things that make you think and improve your thinking and how you build products.

I'll start:

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3874-poison

Sandi Metz - All the Little Things Rails Conf 2014
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE

That was another really fantastic talk. All of Sandi Metz's talks are wonderful.

One of my favorite people on this planet, anything by Bret Victor is top notch. Here are three insanely good talks by him.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pTEmbeENF4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfytHvgHybA

Besides GoRails I have to suggest Destroy All Software. Especially the season with the Sucks/Rocks app. Incredible refactoring and TDD. Material is a bit dated, but the fundamentals are there. Definitely worth the asking price.

This is so good. http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/641779/474137b50693725a/

Tech businesses aren’t successful because they had perfect code and systems. They’re successful because they got a product to market fast and at the right time. They got out their protoype fast (hacks and all), tested and tweaked it, and then scaled. It is wholly arrogant to believe you will have a product on first launch that will be widely acclaimed and quickly adopted. Often it will take fast, iterative changes and tweaks with a small userbase and constant feedback until the right mix of features and pricing are met, along with aggressive marketing — and then growth happens.

http://bigeng.io/post/118399425343/why-the-way-we-look-at-technical-debt-is-wrong

Great post! And very true. Lived it....

It's so TRUE but it can be soooo hard to put stuff out there when you know it's far from "perfect"

Don’t ask people what they want. Watch them and figure out their needs. If you ask, people usually focus on what they have and ask for it to be better: cheaper, faster, smaller. A good observer might discover that the task is unnecessary, that it is possible to restructure things or provide a new technology that eliminates the painstaking parts of their procedures. If you just follow what people ask for, you could end up making their lives even more complicated.

https://blog.openjck.com/less-is-more/

Really enjoyed this post for working with software development teams. http://www.defmacro.org/2014/10/03/engman.html

This was a good read, Chris. Thanks for sharing.

This talk is super interesting - what "OOP" is actually about, from the mouth of the guy who coined the term:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY

https://500ish.com/simple-smile-thumbs-up-8865f5912d84

Thought this was pretty fantastic description of the new slack reactions. I really think they are valuable. The syntax for typing them sucks a bit, but it's getting there.

https://tenderlovemaking.com/

walks through a variety of interesting situations in his typically humorous way:

• I’m calling a method, but I don’t know where it goes
• I’m calling super but I don’t know where that goes
• I’m calling something but I don’t know where it goes (again)

Designing Hypermedia APIs

A great book by Steve Klabnik on Restful Hypermedia API design

https://www.prod.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/mastering-programming/1184427814923414

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2016/10/let-asset-pipeline-die.html?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email

http://clarkdave.net/2015/01/how-to-use-webpack-with-rails/

This is all well and good but if one wants to maintain a sense of mistery and awe about programming, i recommend "We really don't know how to compute" by Jerry Sussman. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3tVctB_VSU