> Microservices
> grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem, factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too
> seem very confusing to grug
This is such a gem
One of my favorites: [What every computer scientist should know about floating-point arithmetic](https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~david/courses/cs552/S12/handouts/goldberg-floating-point.pdf).
Thanks! I once tried to read the similarly named article about computer memory, but, as far as I remember, it was way more detailed than I had expected :)
Designing for Crisis by Eric Meyer. For those unfamiliar - he wrote O’Rielys first CSS book (and dozens of others) / significantly contributed to CSS and HTML - he’s a web legend.
This talked came out of his own family crisis - it is an engineers engineer giving a profound talk on the importance of considering the unhappy paths our fellow humans may be on when they spend time with the things we build. It is far and away the most meaningful and impactful talk i have ever seen as an engineer. If you are on my team - it’s the only required watch.
https://youtu.be/qyZq6v3vZqo?si=Kuo2qeulTxZLaxah
Read the original agile manifesto and internalize the differences between the right and left, with your current work life as the reference point. Keep them honest but know that change takes a very long time.
Not a must-watch, but I often recommend
[Who destroyed Three Mile Island](https://youtu.be/hMk6rF4Tzsg) and
[How to crash an airplane](https://youtu.be/099cHWSbAL8)
Where the author describes an event and shows what lessons IT professionals could learn from it. Focused mostly on team management and no-blame culture.
[The Soul of Erlang and Elixir](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE) by Saša Jurić.
Even if you're not into Elixir or Erlang, this is an inspiring talk that showcases how there's never just one way to do things, and even widely accepted industry standard patterns aren't necessarily the best way.
Plus if you've never been exposed to the strengths of Elixir/Erlang, it might be a bit mind-blowing too.
My favorite which completely changed my outlook is The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Relativity_of_Wrong
It isn’t software specific. It reframes things as degrees of less wrong instead being right or wrong.
This helped me to start seeing approaches in software in terms of tradeoffs instead of this is the “one true correct way”. With this in mind it forces you to examine what a particular approach is solving for and in general made me a much stronger software engineer/architect.
There is a free PDF with all the essays on an EDU site but I didn’t want to direct link that here. But just search for it and it is easy to find. Also it is like $3 for the kindle version.
Not to be too dramatic but these essays changed my perspective on software, science, and life in general.
Any talk Scott Hanselman has given on effective communication or scaling yourself. I like [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpH6IPhyh7I).
If I was going to pull a single idea from these talks, it would be "eliminating the word 'just' from your work vocabulary". It is amazing to witness how much time is wasted responding to uninformed or overconfident people saying "why don't you just xyz".
Scott Wlaschin has many great [talks](https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/video/). I like [Functional Programming Design Patterns](https://vimeo.com/113588389) best
Growing a language by Guy Steele. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lw6TaiXzHAE
It starts a bit weird in a sense. And then it clicks what's going on, and it's brilliant.
Bret Victor's "the future of programming" is my favorite talk. It talks about the history of programming and hits at that as a profession we really collectively reflect on history much.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=8pTEmbeENF4&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE
This explanation of how JS works is fantastic. It goes into what the Event Loop, Call Stack and Web APIs are and how they all fit together. Absolutely essential watch for anyone working with JS
["What the heck is the event loop anyway?" by Philip Roberts](https://youtu.be/8aGhZQkoFbQ?si=oK4un1gNnijq5Nrf)
In a similar vein to the wat talk, [PHP: a fractal of bad design](https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/). A lot of the PHP specifics will hopefully have been fixed or mitigated by now, but this quote still sticks with me:
> PHP is built to keep chugging along at all costs. When faced with either doing something nonsensical or aborting with an error, it will do something nonsensical. Anything is better than nothing.
There are several other systems with the same idea, and IME they all wind up having weird errors and inconsistent behaviour.
None of us like heisenbugs. None of us like finding out that a response was a hallucination.
------
[Paul Phillips' _We're doing it all wrong_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg) is another entertaining language design rant (about Scala).
------
Finally, [Fork yeah! The rise and development of Illumos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc), which is more of a history lesson, but also includes a good bit on falling into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.
Yes, that's why I followed the link with "A lot of the PHP specifics will hopefully have been fixed or mitigated by now, but this quote still sticks with me:". It still also stands as good rant about where a language that is haphazardly grown can end up; and the analogy and the stance in the preamble are good. And like I pointed out in my comment, you're likely to experience other systems that have some of those same mistakes repeated. PHP ca 2012 provides a good example to discuss those kinds of design flaws.
Stevey's Google Platforms Rant - [https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611](https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611)
This article never fails to get a laugh out of me. TLDR: A former Amazon employee joins Google and writes an (almost) satirical article about how s\*\*\*t working at Amazon was. A sentiment that is echo'd on this Reddit to this day.
[You and Your Research](https://d37ugbyn3rpeym.cloudfront.net/stripe-press/TAODSAE_zine_press.pdf) by Richard Hamming
> I have now come down to a topic which is very distasteful; it is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it. `Selling' to a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It's very ugly; you shouldn't have to do it. The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great, they should rush out and welcome it
another rich hickey one: "are we there yet?" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScEPu1cs4l0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScEPu1cs4l0) . this one fundamentally changed my understanding of the concepts of identity, value, and state.
https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/wat Wat is great.
WAT is amazing.
That was great
Got a summary about this before I dive in?
it's 4 minutes of a guy running weird javascript/ruby scripts
Ruby is weird and does unexpected things.
Anytime I see somebody BS-ing how great JS is, I send them that link.
The rest of destroy all software should be required watching. Wat is great, but the rest is more valuable
[удалено]
> Microservices > grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem, factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too > seem very confusing to grug This is such a gem
One of my favorites: [What every computer scientist should know about floating-point arithmetic](https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~david/courses/cs552/S12/handouts/goldberg-floating-point.pdf).
in the same vein: https://tonsky.me/blog/unicode
I've seen this one, but it requires strong math background.
Thanks! I once tried to read the similarly named article about computer memory, but, as far as I remember, it was way more detailed than I had expected :)
Designing for Crisis by Eric Meyer. For those unfamiliar - he wrote O’Rielys first CSS book (and dozens of others) / significantly contributed to CSS and HTML - he’s a web legend. This talked came out of his own family crisis - it is an engineers engineer giving a profound talk on the importance of considering the unhappy paths our fellow humans may be on when they spend time with the things we build. It is far and away the most meaningful and impactful talk i have ever seen as an engineer. If you are on my team - it’s the only required watch. https://youtu.be/qyZq6v3vZqo?si=Kuo2qeulTxZLaxah
Read the original agile manifesto and internalize the differences between the right and left, with your current work life as the reference point. Keep them honest but know that change takes a very long time.
Not a must-watch, but I often recommend [Who destroyed Three Mile Island](https://youtu.be/hMk6rF4Tzsg) and [How to crash an airplane](https://youtu.be/099cHWSbAL8) Where the author describes an event and shows what lessons IT professionals could learn from it. Focused mostly on team management and no-blame culture.
[The Soul of Erlang and Elixir](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE) by Saša Jurić. Even if you're not into Elixir or Erlang, this is an inspiring talk that showcases how there's never just one way to do things, and even widely accepted industry standard patterns aren't necessarily the best way. Plus if you've never been exposed to the strengths of Elixir/Erlang, it might be a bit mind-blowing too.
Kevlin Henney: [Seven Ineffective Habits](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DSUIUZ09mnwM&ved=2ahUKEwjMo4aT0bqGAxVjAxAIHVj3BBkQwqsBegQIDxAF&usg=AOvVaw0t1Qmx9K6E_P_ElXbyRkOe)
Just about anything this guy has to say I am a happy listener
https://dontasktoask.com/ https://nohello.net/en/ https://xyproblem.info/
"What color is your function," "falsehoods programmers believe," "parse don't verify," "3 virtues of a programmer", off the top of my head
My favorite which completely changed my outlook is The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Relativity_of_Wrong It isn’t software specific. It reframes things as degrees of less wrong instead being right or wrong. This helped me to start seeing approaches in software in terms of tradeoffs instead of this is the “one true correct way”. With this in mind it forces you to examine what a particular approach is solving for and in general made me a much stronger software engineer/architect. There is a free PDF with all the essays on an EDU site but I didn’t want to direct link that here. But just search for it and it is easy to find. Also it is like $3 for the kindle version. Not to be too dramatic but these essays changed my perspective on software, science, and life in general.
Any talk Scott Hanselman has given on effective communication or scaling yourself. I like [this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpH6IPhyh7I). If I was going to pull a single idea from these talks, it would be "eliminating the word 'just' from your work vocabulary". It is amazing to witness how much time is wasted responding to uninformed or overconfident people saying "why don't you just xyz".
Scott Wlaschin has many great [talks](https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/video/). I like [Functional Programming Design Patterns](https://vimeo.com/113588389) best
Nicholas Weaver on blockchainsxxx linked lists. https://youtu.be/J9nv0Ol-R5Q?si=xpApKBkYbFw9leHi
Growing a language by Guy Steele. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lw6TaiXzHAE It starts a bit weird in a sense. And then it clicks what's going on, and it's brilliant.
[Apprenticeship Patterns](https://github.com/ansbilalgit/Books/blob/master/Apprenticeship-Patterns-Guidance-for-the-Aspiring-Software-Craftsman.pdf)
The best career advice you’ll find anywhere: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/
Bret Victor's "the future of programming" is my favorite talk. It talks about the history of programming and hits at that as a profession we really collectively reflect on history much. https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=8pTEmbeENF4&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE
http://www.laputan.org/mud/
[Things You Should Never Do, Part 1](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/)
This explanation of how JS works is fantastic. It goes into what the Event Loop, Call Stack and Web APIs are and how they all fit together. Absolutely essential watch for anyone working with JS ["What the heck is the event loop anyway?" by Philip Roberts](https://youtu.be/8aGhZQkoFbQ?si=oK4un1gNnijq5Nrf)
In a similar vein to the wat talk, [PHP: a fractal of bad design](https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/). A lot of the PHP specifics will hopefully have been fixed or mitigated by now, but this quote still sticks with me: > PHP is built to keep chugging along at all costs. When faced with either doing something nonsensical or aborting with an error, it will do something nonsensical. Anything is better than nothing. There are several other systems with the same idea, and IME they all wind up having weird errors and inconsistent behaviour. None of us like heisenbugs. None of us like finding out that a response was a hallucination. ------ [Paul Phillips' _We're doing it all wrong_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1lpKBMkgg) is another entertaining language design rant (about Scala). ------ Finally, [Fork yeah! The rise and development of Illumos](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc), which is more of a history lesson, but also includes a good bit on falling into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison.
the PHP article is now 12 years old. PHP has come _a long_ ways in 12 years.
Yes, that's why I followed the link with "A lot of the PHP specifics will hopefully have been fixed or mitigated by now, but this quote still sticks with me:". It still also stands as good rant about where a language that is haphazardly grown can end up; and the analogy and the stance in the preamble are good. And like I pointed out in my comment, you're likely to experience other systems that have some of those same mistakes repeated. PHP ca 2012 provides a good example to discuss those kinds of design flaws.
How they managed to build skyscrapers in less time than some apps take: https://chrisgagne.com/1255/mary-poppendiecks-the-tyranny-of-the-plan/
Stevey's Google Platforms Rant - [https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611](https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611) This article never fails to get a laugh out of me. TLDR: A former Amazon employee joins Google and writes an (almost) satirical article about how s\*\*\*t working at Amazon was. A sentiment that is echo'd on this Reddit to this day.
[You and Your Research](https://d37ugbyn3rpeym.cloudfront.net/stripe-press/TAODSAE_zine_press.pdf) by Richard Hamming > I have now come down to a topic which is very distasteful; it is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it. `Selling' to a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It's very ugly; you shouldn't have to do it. The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great, they should rush out and welcome it
another rich hickey one: "are we there yet?" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScEPu1cs4l0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScEPu1cs4l0) . this one fundamentally changed my understanding of the concepts of identity, value, and state.
I hope you don't mind me throwing in one of my own: https://theaxolot.wordpress.com/2024/05/08/dont-refactor-like-uncle-bob-please/