PickVidsBest Software architecture & design Videos
The 177 Software architecture & design videos here were recommended by different people across different months. Choose by who it is for: 8 introductory, 132 intermediate, 20 for a general viewer, and 17 for someone who wants the harder derivation. Most of them are a talk. What they share is that one speaker finishes a claim, and the examples exist to hold that claim up. Channels you will keep seeing include ClojureTV, Confreaks, Strange Loop Conference.
The Language of the System - Rich Hickey
Rich Hickey's 2013 talk applies language-design thinking to whole systems, covering names, queues, data, failure, and the interfaces between programs.
Stop Writing Classes
Jack Diederich's PyCon 2012 talk argues that classes are overused in Python and walks through real code, refactoring away unnecessary classes, exceptions and modules.
Pete Hunt: React: Rethinking best practices -- JSConf EU
Pete Hunt of Facebook and Instagram introduces React at JSConf EU 2013 and explains its design principles.
Bottom Up vs Top Down Design in Clojure - Mark Bastian
Mark Bastian contrasts top-down object-oriented design with bottom-up, data-oriented design in Clojure.
"The Mess We're In" by Joe Armstrong
Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang, gives a funny and opinionated Strange Loop talk on the tangled state of software: build tools, package managers, entropy and the physical limits of computation.
Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization (English only)
Jonathan Blow's DevGAMM 2019 talk argues that software knowledge is being lost between generations and that growing layers of abstraction could lead to a decline in technological civilization.
Rails Conf 2012 Keynote: Simplicity Matters by Rich Hickey
Rich Hickey's keynote at RailsConf 2012, a close sibling of his 'Simple Made Easy' talk.
Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025
Casey Muratori's two-hour talk tracing the history of object-oriented programming back to the 1960s and examining how its ideas, and later entity component systems, came about.
Clean Code - Uncle Bob / Lesson 1
The first lesson of Uncle Bob (Robert C.
Alan Kay, 2015: Power of Simplicity
Alan Kay's 2015 talk on the power of simplicity, arguing that systems become simpler by building on more sophisticated fundamental building blocks and that big research horizons drove invention at Xerox PARC.
Domain Modeling Made Functional - Scott Wlaschin
Scott Wlaschin's NDC talk on using statically typed functional programming, F# in particular, to model a business domain.
Unix and Google
A short animated simulation comparing how Multics and Unix were developed, showing why Unix's small composable programs and pipes gave it a efficiency advantage.
James Powell: So you want to be a Python expert? | PyData Seattle 2017
James Powell's nearly two-hour PyData talk builds up Python's data model, decorators, generators and context managers, coding live in Vim.
Casey Muratori | Smart-Pointers, RAII, ZII? Becoming an N+2 programmer
Casey Muratori argues against smart pointers and RAII, advocating grouped-element thinking, zero-is-initialization and stubs as better ways to structure memory and handle errors.
Gtk to Qt - a strange journey [linux.conf.au 2014]
Dirk Hohndel explains why the Subsurface dive log project migrated from Gtk to Qt, the obstacles encountered, and advice for other applications frustrated with Gtk.
Functional architecture - The pits of success - Mark Seemann
Mark Seemann argues that functional programming naturally yields many of the best practices object-oriented developers learn painfully.
Joe Armstrong & Alan Kay - Joe Armstrong interviews Alan Kay
Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, interviews Alan Kay at Code Mesh.
Introduction to NoSQL • Martin Fowler • GOTO 2012
Martin Fowler's GOTO 2012 introduction to NoSQL databases: where they came from, their data models, how consistency thinking differs, and when to use them.
CppCon 2017: Titus Winters “C++ as a "Live at Head" Language”
Titus Winters' CppCon 2017 talk argues for C++ and Google's Abseil to be maintained as a live at head language, relying on testing and automated tooling rather than never changing or promising no compatibility.
"Transducers" by Rich Hickey
Rich Hickey introduces transducers in Clojure, a way to make map, filter and similar algorithms composable independent of the data source.
The Clean Architecture in Python
Brandon Rhodes' PyOhio 2014 talk on applying the Clean Architecture in Python.
Rich Hickey rants about HttpServletRequest in 1080p: Death By Specificity from Clojure Made Simple
A five-minute excerpt of Rich Hickey's Clojure Made Simple talk, with new slides, ranting about HttpServletRequest and specificity.
DjangoCon 2008 Keynote: Cal Henderson
Cal Henderson's DjangoCon 2008 keynote, "Why I Hate Django", is a funny critique of Django from a Flickr architect.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Multiple Dispatch | Stefan Karpinski | JuliaCon 2019
Julia co-creator Stefan Karpinski explains why multiple dispatch makes Julia code and types reusable across packages with so little friction.