List of YouTube channels for improving web development and programming skills

good videos! im so reluctant to watch this topic on youtube because so many people are trying to sound smart / hip, but you are perfectly focused on the actual subject. thanks!

This has been my experience as well. In that introductory period when you're first dipping your toes into a new topic I think youtube videos are great at getting you introduced to the vocabulary you're going to need to pick up. Sometimes a new topic can seem much more complex than it really is because there's a lot of unfamiliar terms being used and not because of the actual complexity of topic. Youtube is a pretty gentle way of getting familiar with the lingo so that you have an understanding of what exactly it is you don't know, and what to search to figure it out on your own.

There are some videos that are useful on an even higher level because they cause you to question your way of thinking on a subject. Rich Hickey's talks were like this for me and I think the video format really was the best for that. Some people are just really talented orators and things wouldn't translate as well to text only.

Like someone else had mentioned, the list is comprised of channels geared heavily at web development featuring content for early career developers.

There are a ton of channels that dig deeper in more general software and particulars: 1. Algorithms Live! for those that are into competitive programming

2. PapersWeLove for those that are into white papers and the research that underpins some of the systems that we use today

3. 3Blue1Brown for mathematics

4. ThePrimeagen for Vim and other software things

5. Gaurav Sen for digestible chunks of system design components

6. code_report for just programming. The author is going through Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) at the moment

7. commaaai archive for following George Hotz, founder and creator of comma.ai, a self-driving car company. He was a former Googler working on zero days (security)

8. Jon Gjengset for Rust. He's got a lot of great videos as an open-source contributor in Rust projects and was most recently at MIT doing his PhD

9. Bitwise is a bit old (last post was a year ago), but former Oculus lead dev teaching folks about compilers, simulators, FPGA-based hardware, and other low level topics from a practitioner

10. Two Minute Papers for quick high level hits/overviews of whitepapers

11. Engineer Man for great short introductions into various parts of the stack, scripting, Unix, and other abstractions

There are many more and recorded streams from other programmers teaching random things. There are tons of engineers on Twitch representing a multitude of companies like Lyft, CockroachDB, Netflix, and others working on open-source projects.

As a more experienced developer, I much prefer these channels over the ones listed, but my point is that the content is there when people actually search. The YouTube algos may not pick up all of them immediately and is most certainly more dominated by content directed at less experienced devs, but I much prefer some of this to the course recommendations that others are stating. Courses are really good, once you're convinced you want to do a deep dive into something, but most people do not finish MOOCs.

This list needs thenewboston [1]. I got into programming by learning Android development, and learned entirely by watching his channel. He has hundreds of tutorial videos on everything from Adobe suite products to Angular to PyGame and he's incredibly thorough on each one.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/user/thenewboston

For programming, yes, especially if you're a beginner. But for more conceptual aspects of software engineering and system design, or tutorials on new technologies, videos can sometimes be useful.

Here's a good recent one by Raymond Hettinger on making things easier for yourself when programming, such as ways of reducing how many things you'll need to keep in working memory at once. It actually does directly involve a lot of pure code so it's maybe not the best example of what I described, but it's mostly focused on cognition and is generalizable to programming in any language, or possibly doing any kind of demanding mental work in any field.

"The Mental Game of Python" - https://youtu.be/UANN2Eu6ZnM