The Myth of the Genius Programmer
Two Googlers on insecurity, ego, and why the best engineers are the ones who can collaborate without pretending to know everything.
Go Concurrency Patterns
Rob Pike·2012·Google I/ORob Pike on goroutines and channels as primitives, and how a handful of small composable patterns add up to a coherent model for concurrent programs.
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.
Oral Tradition in Software Engineering
Bryan Cantrill·2016·MonktoberfestCantrill on how the craft is actually transmitted — stories, mentors, war anecdotes — and what gets lost when we pretend software is purely a written discipline.
The Mind Behind Linux
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Linus Torvalds·2016·TEDAn unusually candid TED conversation in which Torvalds describes himself as an engineer, not a visionary, and explains the temperament behind Linux and Git.
All Questions Answered
Donald Knuth·2011·StanfordDon Knuth takes unscreened audience questions for an hour — on Wikipedia, on what's next in CS, on his most memorable mistakes, on how to write programs you can still read in twenty years.
You and Your Research
Richard Hamming·1986·Bell LabsRichard Hamming's 1986 lecture on how to do truly important work — courage, focus, the company you keep, and what separates a great career from a competent one.