Software Architecture & Design Videos Hacker News Recommends

talk#12

RailsConf 2014 - All the Little Things by Sandi Metz

Confreaks

“this talk captures all the important values in a single example.”

15 HN recommenders · 2015–2025

talk#17

"Simple Made Easy" - Rich Hickey (2011)

Strange Loop Conference

“is a must-watch (even if you never touch Clojure)”

14 HN recommenders · 2022–2026

talk#31

"Making Impossible States Impossible" by Richard Feldman

elm-conf

“the talk is Elm lang focused, but the concepts still apply to other languages.”

9 HN recommenders · 2017–2026

talk#64

How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters

Google TechTalks

“Absolutely far and away the best resource that I found was this Google TechTalk by Joshua Bloch”

12 HN recommenders · 2011–2025

talk#69

The Value of Values with Rich Hickey

InfoQ

“is what finally sold me on the benefits of pure functional programming and immutable data structures.”

10 HN recommenders · 2014–2023

talk#78

Overwatch Gameplay Architecture and Netcode

GDC Festival of Gaming

“This Overwatch GDC talk is the best breakdown/example of data-oriented ECS in a AAA game that I know of”

16 HN recommenders · 2019–2025

talk#87

Solving Problems the Clojure Way - Rafal Dittwald

Clojure/north

“I urge you to watch this fantastic video which illustrates procedural, OOP(lite), and FP approaches to a sample problem”

10 HN recommenders · 2019–2025

lecture#91

Lecture 1A: Overview and Introduction to Lisp

MIT OpenCourseWare

“I watched and cannot recommend it enough, even for seasoned programmers”

10 HN recommenders · 2019–2026

talk#110

Alan Kay - Normal Considered Harmful

powerfuloutlet

“his talk 'Normal Considered Harmful' in particular is worth a look as it pretty much goes straight to the heart of the issue”

10 HN recommenders · 2012–2026

talk#120

A Philosophy of Software Design | John Ousterhout | Talks at Google

Talks at Google

“This google talk is a condensed version of the (already small - 150 pags IIRC) book. I highly recommend both.”

11 HN recommenders · 2018–2026

talk#122

"Uncle" Bob Martin - "The Future of Programming"

Paul Stringer's Mobile Tech

“It's a fascinating introduction to the evolution of hardware and programming languages.”

10 HN recommenders · 2016–2022

talk#126

Effective Programs - 10 Years of Clojure - Rich Hickey

ClojureTV

“Whole video is gold, is my fav programming talk of all time.”

10 HN recommenders · 2017–2026

talk#127

Brian Goetz - Stewardship: the Sobering Parts

ClojureTV

“Brian Goetz's talk nails it on the head why the languages in my day-to-day are sub-optimal”

10 HN recommenders · 2014–2025

talk#136

Ruby Midwest 2011 - Keynote: Architecture the Lost Years by Robert Martin

Confreaks

“The talk that had the most influence on how I write software is Robert 'Uncle Bob' Martin's "Architecture: The Lost Years”

10 HN recommenders · 2013–2022

talk#139

RustConf 2018 - Closing Keynote - Using Rust For Game Development by Catherine West

Rust Programming Language

“is still my favorite ECS explanation, because she builds the concept piece by piece starting from megaclass-hell to full entities-as-IDs with reasons for each step.”

9 HN recommenders · 2018–2023

talk#144

Hammock Driven Development - Rich Hickey

ClojureTV

“Both of these talks are in my top 5.”

12 HN recommenders · 2014–2024

talk#159

Jonathan Blow - How to program independent games - CSUA Speech

Alexandre Franco

“It's about much more than games. To me, it's about identifying and not doing unnecessary work.”

9 HN recommenders · 2015–2026

talk#170

Ruby Conf 12 - Boundaries by Gary Bernhardt

Confreaks

“I highly recommend this video for a more philosophical take on how to do "impure FP" without OO”

8 HN recommenders · 2015–2024

lecture#174

The Only Unbreakable Law

Molly Rocket

“Casey Muratori has an excellent lecture on this same topic”

12 HN recommenders · 2022–2026

talk#192

Spec-ulation Keynote - Rich Hickey

ClojureTV

“Whenever an idea about API versioning springs into mind it is always worthwhile to watch Rich Hickey's Spec-ulation talk”

10 HN recommenders · 2016–2024

talk#196

CppCon 2014: Mike Acton "Data-Oriented Design and C++"

CppCon

“one of the most digestible ways to start thinking about performance in high throughput systems”

9 HN recommenders · 2015–2026

talk#206

How I program C

Eskil Steenberg

“the only 2 hour YouTube video I'll ever recommend”

8 HN recommenders · 2017–2025

commentary#217

Object-Oriented Programming is Bad

Brian Will

“I highly recommend this video by Brian Will who does a much better job explaining this problem than I could.”

13 HN recommenders · 2016–2025

talk#218

The Language of the System - Rich Hickey

ClojureTV

“it has really changed the way I look at distributed persistent storage.”

10 HN recommenders · 2013–2025

talk#232

Stop Writing Classes

Next Day Video

“Jack Diederich has a great video called Stop Writing Classes: It's about Python, but the observation can apply to several languages.”

8 HN recommenders · 2012–2025

talk#237

Pete Hunt: React: Rethinking best practices -- JSConf EU

JSConf

“See Pete Hunt's famous talk”

9 HN recommenders · 2014–2025

talk#278

Bottom Up vs Top Down Design in Clojure - Mark Bastian

ClojureTV

“is the talk that really made it clear to me how to design programs this way.”

5 HN recommenders · 2016–2021

talk#287

"The Mess We're In" by Joe Armstrong

Strange Loop Conference

“one of those talks which were incredibly funny and informative at the same time”

10 HN recommenders · 2014–2025

talk#292

Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization (English only)

bus

“Very much worth watching in its entirety and thinking about”

11 HN recommenders · 2019–2023

talk#331

Rails Conf 2012 Keynote: Simplicity Matters by Rich Hickey

Confreaks

“maybe watch this version instead, since it's almost the same talk but for a Rails Conference, with a few references”

8 HN recommenders · 2015–2024

talk#334

Casey Muratori – The Big OOPs: Anatomy of a Thirty-five-year Mistake – BSC 2025

Better Software Conference

“which really is hunting back and back for the cosmogenesis of objects, and covers so much terrain.”

11 HN recommenders · 2025–2026

lecture#338

Clean Code - Uncle Bob / Lesson 1

UnityCoin

“Clean Code is a great book, but the presentation is so much better”

6 HN recommenders · 2020–2026

talk#348

Alan Kay, 2015: Power of Simplicity

Kenneth Friedman

“Easily over of the most thought provoking presentations I have seen recently.”

6 HN recommenders · 2015–2025

talk#353

Domain Modeling Made Functional - Scott Wlaschin

NDC Conferences

“If anyone is looking for a really eye-opening video take a look at that this.”

6 HN recommenders · 2018–2024

explainer#385

Unix and Google

FOAM

“A guy on YT [1] simulates in 7 minutes how the two biggest operating systems were built in the sixties”

4 HN recommenders · 2016–2023

talk#413

James Powell: So you want to be a Python expert? | PyData Seattle 2017

PyData

“It's legitimately the best technical talk I think I've seen and I can't recommend it highly enough.”

6 HN recommenders · 2020–2026

talk#433

Casey Muratori | Smart-Pointers, RAII, ZII? Becoming an N+2 programmer

xDahl

“The best video on this might be from Casey Muratori”

6 HN recommenders · 2024–2026

talk#473

Gtk to Qt - a strange journey [linux.conf.au 2014]

Konstantin Bläsi

“One of the best discussions on the subject, made by old hackers, but new guys to GUI programming, who tried both”

5 HN recommenders · 2014–2024

talk#479

Functional architecture - The pits of success - Mark Seemann

NDC Conferences

“Here is a great talk demonstrating that by following a simple functional approach, your code can naturally fall into a “pit of success”

5 HN recommenders · 2018–2025

interview#489

Joe Armstrong & Alan Kay - Joe Armstrong interviews Alan Kay

Erlang Solutions

“To get some perspective on both of their perspectives, here's "Joe Armstrong interviews Alan Kay"”

6 HN recommenders · 2016–2026

talk#504

Introduction to NoSQL • Martin Fowler • GOTO 2012

GOTO Conferences

“one of the rare videos I've required students in my database classes to watch.”

6 HN recommenders · 2015–2021

talk#508

CppCon 2017: Titus Winters “C++ as a "Live at Head" Language”

CppCon

“a much more nuanced look at dependencies & versioning”

7 HN recommenders · 2017–2022

talk#532

"Transducers" by Rich Hickey

Strange Loop Conference

“If you want a really good intro, watch Rich Hickey's talk about transducers”

6 HN recommenders · 2014–2025

talk#544

The Clean Architecture in Python

Next Day Video

“I'd really recommend this video.”

5 HN recommenders · 2017–2021

talk#578

Rich Hickey rants about HttpServletRequest in 1080p: Death By Specificity from Clojure Made Simple

Fred Overflow

“A classic rant by Rich Hickey”

5 HN recommenders · 2020–2026

talk#588

DjangoCon 2008 Keynote: Cal Henderson

Google for Developers

“a brilliant (and hilarious) talk”

6 HN recommenders · 2009–2026

talk#596

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Multiple Dispatch | Stefan Karpinski | JuliaCon 2019

The Julia Programming Language

“a talk by a core developer at JuliaCon 2019 titled 'The unreasonable effectiveness of multiple dispatch'”

9 HN recommenders · 2019–2025

talk#610

TigerStyle! (Or How To Design Safer Systems in Less Time) by Joran Dirk Greef

TigerBeetle

“The TigerStyle video is well worth watching for anyone who wants to build defect-free software systems”

2 HN recommenders · 2023–2025