The YouTube Channel That Replaced My CS Degree
Most engineers learn modern software engineering from Stack Overflow answers written in 2013. There's a YouTube channel that will genuinely change how you think about distributed systems, and almost nobody in your team has heard of it. Here's what I wish I'd found three years earlier.
In 2021, our payments team (180 engineers, processing about $2M/day) spent six weeks debugging a cascading failure that turned out to be a textbook distributed systems problem. Textbook. That incident cost us roughly $340k in engineering time and customer credits. Nobody on the team knew the pattern, because nobody had ever been taught it.
The channel is Modern Software Engineering by Dave Farley. Former ThoughtWorks principal, co-author of Continuous Delivery. He covers things like feedback loops, modularity, and empirical process control in a way that actually sticks.
Why this hits different
Most YouTube content teaches you how to use tools. Dave teaches you how to think. There's a video on coupling and cohesion that would have saved my team that six weeks. I sent it to three ICs on my current team and two of them rewatched it the same day.
One of my engineers told me: 'I've been writing code for four years and nobody explained this once.'
As a manager, I now see the career impact clearly. Engineers who understand these fundamentals get promoted faster, not because they're smarter, but because they can articulate tradeoffs. That skill shows up in design docs, in incident reviews, in every conversation with product.
Where to start
Don't start from the beginning. Watch The Problem With Software Engineering first, then TDD, Where Did It All Go Wrong. Both are under 30 minutes. Both will change how you write code tomorrow.
When I was an IC, I would have killed for someone to just point me here. So. Here you go.