Ask HN: Screencasts of skilled developers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Screencasts of skilled developers?

30 pointsdbtc14 comments

Tutorials and docs are fantastic and definitely important, but I think watching highly skilled/experienced software developers doing what they do might fill in a lot of missing pieces for anyone who is no longer a beginner and not yet at the very top of their craft (that's probably most people who get paid to write code)

For example, Gary Bernhardt's Destroy All Software screencasts are really helpful for me, I learn a ton just watching how he uses is tools https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts

What other screencasts/videos are like this? Programming language and tools don't matter to me, in fact I think more variation would be better - to see how different tools are used.

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I generally just watch YouTube videos of conference talks. When somebody says something interesting i look what else they have done in the past. If somebody is at an above expert level at a complex tool, he or she often has a history of publications about that topic.

There are some channels [0,1], which post them. Tech companies often have developer channels, too. I find Google's to market their own products to much. Facebook tells quite interesting war stories.

Finding videos is not really the problem, because they are generally 30 to 60 minutes long. When you bookmark them or add them to your watch-later list, they quickly add up. I have about 200 of them waiting to be watched.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/Confreaks

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/MarakanaTechTV

http://handmadehero.org/ is a currently active series where an experienced professional game developer is simultaneously coding and explaining the creation of an entire commercial game completely from scratch (without the use of middleware or libraries beyond OS vendor standard libs). The explanation is aimed at beginners and is very nicely delivered. https://www.youtube.com/user/handmadeheroarchive

Great thread! Being more of a backend coder rather than frontend, I lately started consolidating my frontend skills with new projects. Very SASS focused ( I love it!).

These channels gave me some really nice ideas, I recommend to have a look at them!

https://www.youtube.com/user/DevTipsForDesigners/videos

https://www.youtube.com/user/phpacademy/videos

A mix of tech & normal stuff: http://www.youtube.com/user/derekbanas/playlists

http://www.screencasts.org/

http://www.youtube.com/user/JetBrainsTV

http://www.youtube.com/user/elithecomputerguy

Why would I take a screencast of myself reading HackerNews?

Answering my own question here, but I'd still love to see anyone else's suggestions!

This seems like a good compilation: http://devblog.avdi.org/2013/06/21/a-list-of-programming-scr...

I like Treehouse's YouTube podcast called The Treehouse Show: https://youtube.com/user/gotreehouse

What would you be interested in seeing? I can't make any screen casts of work projects but I can do them for personal stuff.

Soup to nuts deployment issues. When to use Docker. What to monitor, when. What logs to look at. How to balance security against convenience. How to use Fabric to deploy a Python app. How to completely script server deployment of web apps. How to turn a toy database-backed app written in Python into production code, and exactly what shims, insecure development features, etc. should be removed.

What tools/languages are you good at?

Java/Scala, Postgres, Cassandra, Redis, Titan, Hazelcast, RabbitMQ, most Spring libraries, Wicket, almost all features of AWS, and more.

I agree. I imagine I could learn quite a bit just from sitting behind a Google/Facebook engineer for a few hours.

The Play by Play series on Pluralsight (previously Peep Code) has pair sessions with some very skilled developers.

https://laracasts.com/

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