Ask HN: Favorite talks [video] on software development?

6 points by joeclark77 11y ago ↗ HN

I'm (re)designing a course on software project management which has morphed into a survey of agile approaches, scrum, version control, DevOps, testing, and other pieces of the modern software development business. I'm looking for recommendations of videos (TED talks, conference presentations, lectures, whatever) that I can add to my syllabus as recommended viewing on each of these topics. Can y'all help me out with some recommendations?

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productionQA 11y ago ↗

Probably not exactly what you need, but as far as inspiration is concerned, it doesn't get much better than this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUv66718DII

Check out Bret Victor's talks in general (worrydream.com). He is quite interesting.

logn 11y ago ↗

This is a good one on version control:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 (Linus' Git talk at Google)

And as far as the business of software, especially the internet, surveillance, trust, and marketing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3NJ-Ow2Lvg (Bruce Schneier talk at Google shortly after Snowden revelations)

joeclark77 11y ago ↗

I think I saw that one by Linus on Youtube but didn't have time to watch it. I'm going to have this class use Git to submit all their work (project and otherwise). I've used it a lot for my own work, but never on a team project, so I will need something of a primer on how to do branching, merging, and so forth.

I understand there's a typical workflow in which you have 'master' for the releases, 'dev' for the latest working version, and feature branches are branched off 'dev'. If there's a good video on how to do that, it'd be ideal.

logn 11y ago ↗

I don't know of a video. But you should check out this project and its readme:

https://github.com/nvie/gitflow

edit: oh, the readme links to screen-casts! Also, I've worked on teams that require gitflow so I assume it's useful experience for students to have.

joeclark77 11y ago ↗

That link led me to another, which led to this original article on the git-flow model: http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

Thanks! That's just what I was looking for.

joeclark77 11y ago ↗

More specifically, I'm looking (at least) for talks on the following topics:

- Agile requirements definition, user stories, and/or backlog grooming. I'd like something that emphasizes how you can use acceptance criteria or BDD to make user stories more informative than just a sticky note.

- Continuous integration; maybe something that involves automated deployment to a cloud hosting service like Heroku or Azure.

- Maybe something about building an open source project, creating an identity, finding community, promoting the software, etc.

- Something about careers in development, or software project management, or scrummastering, that would be relevant to college seniors about to be kicked out into the world.

Other great talks or videos would be awesome, too, and maybe I'll find a place for them if they're good enough.

stevenspasbo 11y ago ↗

I asked a similar question a while ago and got a lot of great answers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7609584