It’s often hard for people to understand what Git is doing, because it’s so different from other version-control systems. In this talk, Sam Livingston-Gray suggests that one way to improve your understanding of Git is to understand some math, and particularly graph theory.
Steve Klabnik: Designing Hypermedia APIs
How should we design APIs that allow us to handle many types of media? In this talk, Steve Klabnik discusses “real REST” vs. “Rails REST,” and shows you how to design a useful and clean API that will allow people to consume various types of media.
Reuven Lerner: What Ruby can learn from Python (and vice versa)
Reuven Lerner (that’s me) gave this talk at the online hack.summit() in December 2014. In this talk, I compare the syntax of Ruby and Python, and consider the language design trade-offs that have been made, as well as the relative strengths of each language.
Mark Bates: CoffeeScript for Rubyists
CoffeeScript is a language that compiles into JavaScript, and which is easier to work with in many ways. It is also part of modern versions of Ruby on Rails. In this talk, Mark Bates introduces CoffeeScript.
Mathias Bynens: 10 Things I Didn’t Know About HTML
In this talk, Web developer Mathias Bynens describes some of the more advanced and interesting features of modern HTML, as well as some tools you can use to test and explore them.
Herb Sutter: Lock-Free Programming (or, Juggling Razor Blades), Part I
Locks are something that nearly every programmer needs to deal with, particularly when working with threads. In this talk, Herb Sutter describes how you can work without such locks in C++.
Rob Sanheim: How Getting Buff Can Make You a Better Rubyist
In this talk, Rob Sanheim tells programmers that physical fitness is not only good for your body, but for your coding as well.
Bo Jeanes: The Black Magic of SSH
Bo Jeanes demonstrates some absolutely amazing things that you can do with ssh. If you use ssh, then you will likely learn a bunch of new tricks from watching this talk. If nothing else, seeing text-based slides is itself worthwhile.
Bruce Momjian: Programming the SQL Way with Common Table Expressions
In this talk from Postgres Open 2013, Bruce Momjian introduces the idea of “Common Table Expressions” (aka “CTEs”), which allow you to accomplish a great deal of programming power within a single (if complex) SQL query. If you work with PostgreSQL, then you really should learn about CTEs, and this talk is one way to do it. Slides for this talk are at http://momjian.us/main/writings/pgsql/cte.pdf.
Jim Weirich: Y Not? Adventures in Functional Programming
Jim Weirich, in this talk from RubyConf 2012, described combinators (including the Y combinator) and other aspects of functional programming. If you thought that functional programming is hard to wrap your head around, Jim makes it fun and relatively easy to understand.