Talks and articles about programming, that I find inspiring:
- Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
- When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave, ‘Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams’ wasn’t about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because time is all you have and you may find one day that you have less than you think). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.
- A Last Lecture by Dartmouth Professor Thomas Cormen
- Cormen's talk was inspired by Randy Pauschs last talk. After teaching for over 27 years at Dartmouth College, Thomas Cormen, a Professor of Computer Science and an ACM Distinguished Educator, gave his last lecture sharing thoughts, wisdom, sadness and laughter.
- The Best Programmer I Know • Daniel Terhorst-North • GOTO 2024
- Get the job done: Start anywhere, It doesn’t have to be right, or even good, Try, fail, learn, repeat
- Build a product: Invest in the outcome, Study the domain, Watch your users
- Solve for now
- Choose the right tool: Teams can learn, Do the simplest thing, not the easiest, The ‘right tool’ may change over time
- Make the change easy: minimize blast radius, Reduce, reuse, recycle, Then do the same with production code!
- Be a polyglot: Explore languages, tools, paradigms, Be really full-stack
- Care about the team: Find joy in helping others learn and be kind
- A Bunch of Programming Advice I’d Give To Myself 15 Years Ago
- If you (or your team) are shooting yourselves in the foot constantly, fix the gun
- Spending time sharpening the axe is almost always worth it
- If you can’t easily explain why something is difficult, then it’s incidental complexity, which is probably worth addressing
- Try to solve bugs one layer deeper
- When working on a team, you should usually ask the question
- Shipping cadence matters a lot. Think hard about what will get you shipping quickly and often
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