Programming is Terrible — Lessons Learned from a Life Wasted
Thomas Figg·2012·EMF Camp·1 hrA bracing, funny, slightly bitter talk on legacy code, technical debt, and the fact that no clean rewrite stays clean.
Crafting quality that endures
Karri Saarinen·2025·Figma ConfigThe Linear CEO on why software quality is something a company has to value out loud — and how Linear's process keeps the bar from drifting as it scales.
The Wet Codebase
Dan Abramov·2019·DeconstructAbramov on what DRY actually costs once you've lived with a too-clever abstraction — and why writing the same code twice is sometimes the right answer.
Platform as a Reflection of Values
Bryan Cantrill·2017·Node SummitWhy every platform — language, OS, runtime — encodes a particular ordering of competing virtues, and why a good fit is really an alignment of values.
The Future of Programming
"Uncle" Bob Martin·2016·Expert TalksBob Martin walks through 60 years of programming history and argues that almost nothing has actually changed.
The Silver Bullet Syndrome
Hadi Hariri·2016·NDCHadi Hariri on our industry's restless faith that the next language, framework, or platform will finally fix everything — and why it never does.
Seven Ineffective Coding Habits of Many Programmers
Kevlin Henney·2016·NDCKevlin Henney dissects seven things programmers do reflexively — noisy comments, getters and setters, lego-naming — and what to do instead.