John Cleese on Creativiy

Even though it seems to have been recorded quite a while back, a brilliant talk by John Cleese (Monty Python) on creativity: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg&feature=player_embedded

crazybob at StrangeLoop

Nice talk by Bob Lee where he basically explains what's going on at Square, the company at which he's CTO at the moment: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Square

Hierarchial Databases

In case you're dealing with a natural hierarchical model and are tired of bending existing solutions to simulate hierarchies, check out ModeShape. It's lightweight and LGPL licensed.

Google Data Center

via street view . Pretty cool !

Liberalism / Conservatism in Software Engineering

A brilliant essay by Steve Yegge: https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/KaSKeg4vQtz

Java Generics and Extreme Sports

If you've every used generics in Java and thought that
public abstract class Enum<E extends Enum<E>> implements Comparable<E>, Serializable sends your neural synapses into an infinite loop, check this example out, courtesy of Spring Data: http://blog.springsource.org/2012/08/03/the-most-amazing-java-type-declaration-ever/

GitHub investment or merger ?

It seems that GitHub got a 100 mil investment from Andreessen Horowitz, which seems pretty substantial. Wonder if there are any strings attached to this...

How LinkedIn makes 20 times more money than Facebook, per user

Wouldn't have thought it, really: http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2012/06/27/how-linkedin-strategy/

MVC on the Web

Food for thought on implementing MVC when running web-apps.

OS X

Another awesome comic strip: http://xkcd.com/1056

Dan North, latest talk from QCon 2012

From last month's London QCon: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Decisions-Decisions
IMO, Dan's presentations are some of the easiest to follow and entertaining out there.

Responsive Design

An old (2009) QCon presentation from Kent Beck on some basic and obvious design principles. Really good and "easily" watchable.

Sufficient Design

Nice talk from Joshua Kerievsky on what "efficient development" is, from a business and engineering point of view.

Creative Thinking Presentation

Scott Berkun - http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2012/creative-thinking-hacks-video/  (about 1h long, but worth watching)

Job Interviews

Brilliant essay (using a cooking metaphor) about the different styles of job interviews out there in the software industry.

To be fair, I came across this from Uncle Bob's blog.

Regulating Software Development

Good point made by Uncle Bob: http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2012/01/12/The-Letter.html (the letter mentioned is a horror-story example, some of which I have also seen since starting working in software development)

Brian Foote, QCon interview

At infoq: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/foote-oop-code. If you don't know who Brian is, too bad, you should (http://www.laputan.org/). In my book, he's right up there with the top minds of the software development industry "school".

GitHub File Finder

Another cool trick with GitHub: while in the file view (explorer) of a repository, type "t" and watch the "magic unfold" ;) (original post here: https://github.com/blog/793-introducing-the-file-finder)

Why GitHub is really cool

One of coolest things I've come across in the last couple of months is GitHub and the entire workflow behind it. Here's a good presentation of some of the cool features: http://confreaks.net/videos/754-rubymidwest2011-how-github-uses-github-to-build-github

Architecture - The Lost Years

If you've followed the "controversy" between Uncle Bob's view of architecture and that of Simon Brown, you can check the latest "episode" via Robert Martin's Ruby Midwest 2011 keynote: http://confreaks.net/videos/759-rubymidwest2011-keynote-architecture-the-lost-years

As a side-note, at least in his 2011 talks, Robert Martin always mentions a physics experiment at the beginning of each talk. What's up with that ?