These days I only see videos about cracking the coding interview on YouTube; after a point it seems to get boring. Have you felt the same way? That is good content on software development isn't present?
Most content creators on YT want to grow their channel which is mostly at odds with covering complex topics in depth too much. Some channels, like Veritasium, do a decent job of taking complex subjects and presenting them to a wider audience - although many mathematicians and physicists do take issue sometimes.<p>A pattern you'll often find on YT is similar to how Intel and other manufacturing companies do the "Tick" and "Tock" pattern. They'll release a difficult to research, complex and time consuming video, followed by a few easier to produce videos with a lower cost of entry knowledge wise to pay the bills.<p>Tom7 is an interesting exception to this rule. He puts out about one video per year, but they're all very very well done. But, they're also tongue-in-cheek and he's not _really_ trying to teach you anything - but you'll probably learn something in the process!
In my opinion, technical content is best presented in document form. Easier for the user to search, easier for the producer to create, easier for aggregators to index, faster to consume/skim over irrelevant parts, and it loads much quicker than a video does.
<p><pre><code> - Primer: mainly about simulations and genetic algorithms - https://www.youtube.com/c/PrimerLearning
- Reducible: about computer science and algorithms in general - https://www.youtube.com/c/Reducible
- The Chermo: about game dev in C++ - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheChernoProject
- Sebastian Lague: about game dev/simulations with Unity - https://www.youtube.com/user/Cercopithecan
</code></pre>
That's about it for me. Most of them don't publish often though.
I wouldn't bother with most creators, they often create content for beginners as that is the best way to rake in many views.<p>IMHO the best strategy to get high-quality content for specific topics is to look for conferences that post their talks. Personally I enjoy e.g. the CppCon and RustCon channels, as well as the PyCon one. There are some other sites like media.ccc.de where you'll find a ton of technical videos as well.
InfoQ is pretty good - <a href="https://youtube.com/nctv" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/nctv</a><p>The channel covers a ton of topics but the viewership is low and there's no clear trend in video popularity. Therefore you don't know if a video is any good until you get a few minutes in, but some are very good. And they do deliver on the technical quality front.
YouTube's algorithm and payment model doesn't reward in-depth coding content. Other services pay authors a lot more for in-depth niche content, so that's where all the content ends up.<p>YouTube's whole deal is that (1) they will promote you only if lots of people consume your content immediately and rabidly and (2) they will pay you a tiny bit for each view, so you need a <i>lot</i> of views to make anything.<p>This makes it nearly impossible for an author to make in-depth content on niche topics while making a profit. The audience is (1) too small for YouTube to care and (2) often only needs your niche educational content once, so they don't become rabid, multi-year subscribers. The lack of continued engagement snowballs to make YouTube promote your content less and less, so you never get views. Even worse, every niche video will cause YouTube's algo to actively make each future video on your channel get less and less views - a depressing downward spiral for your channel.<p>You might say that someone might make in-depth coding content for free (and a few do, like Coding Secrets), but the kind of people who can communicate well and also program well are in huge demand and probably too busy making real money to spend hundreds of hours to make $3 on YouTube when much better options exist.<p>On the other hand, this is way you see so many YouTube ads for 3rd party paid online course services. These services (LinkedIn Learning, SkillShare, etc.) pay authors more reasonably for their niche content and are built around promoting content for audiences who want to learn. The other strategy that works well is for the author to make very general content on YouTube and then advertise their own course or book to their biggest fans. Both models can sustain someone's full-time income or author's who build an audience and then self-publish their own content can often make 6 figures+.
A way to find good content is videos uploaded by good conferences. These can go back years and have hundreds of videos each.<p>There are also great meetups that share their video online.
Consider searching for talks from conferences you wish you could have attended. This likely represents hundreds of hours of content you would enjoy.<p>You might also consider some of the free courses on YouTube. I've found Harvard's and Yale's courses to be optimized well for video, MIT's less so (it depends on the course though).<p>I don't really follow a lot of the higher level abstraction channels like "Computerphile." Although I do generally enjoy those videos when I see them.<p>I'm more likely to search for the topic that I want to learn about and then skip around many videos until I find the one with the production quality, tone, volume, etc that is most clear and enjoyable to me. Often, you do have to settle for badly made videos on obscure topics (but no complaints! Better than nothing.)
Given the extremely large spectrum of "technical content" available for someone to focus on, can you provide more detailed examples of what would be higher quality technical content in your opinion?<p>BTW, I'm not disagreeing with you at all as I too agree. I'm just wondering what things you also see as missing.<p>I find most user content is focused on the introductory level, which makes sense if you are attempting to appeal to the largest audiences for income (so not faulting anyone). I often see content on data engineering but most just define "data engineering" and at most talk about things high level Hadoop, Spark, etc. and do not provide any examples/patterns of working with data that is even close to representative to what I do in my day job. The same is true many other technical disciplines too. With a couple notable exceptions on some security topics (such as demonstrating certain exploits), and some hardware topics -- such as Ben Eater's great work (<a href="https://eater.net/" rel="nofollow">https://eater.net/</a>)
Yes. YouTube tends to encourage sensationalized content, as it often leads to increased watch time. So education channels usually aren't as lucrative. This being said, there are quite a few hidden gems:
<a href="https://youtube.com/c/Reducible" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/c/Reducible</a>
<a href="https://youtube.com/c/VCubingX" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/c/VCubingX</a>
<a href="https://youtube.com/channel/UCG2IoSJBUhrGL8fb5stMCWw" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/channel/UCG2IoSJBUhrGL8fb5stMCWw</a>
<a href="https://youtube.com/channel/UCEwhtpXrg5MmwlH04ANpL8A" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/channel/UCEwhtpXrg5MmwlH04ANpL8A</a>
<a href="https://youtube.com/c/CodeParade" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/c/CodeParade</a>
<a href="https://youtube.com/c/YannicKilcher" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/c/YannicKilcher</a>
<a href="https://youtube.com/c/SebastianLague" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/c/SebastianLague</a><p>and of course my channel!:
<a href="https://youtube.com/channel/UCuHB_2AOt8vjuvZZp6tSoxg" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/channel/UCuHB_2AOt8vjuvZZp6tSoxg</a>
Youtube values consistency. New channels that want to break through the noise need to upload regularly, similar content that drives engagement and watch time.<p>Lengthy, in-depth technical content doesn't match those criteria.<p>So if you want to produce that kind of videos, you end-up with only 2 options:<p>- Channels that are not motivated by revenue, that will post a series of videos then slumber or get abandoned.<p>- Channels that are sponsored by companies that will try to sell you their language, framework, SaaS, etc... masquerading as technical content
I have found quite a few good creators on youtube.<p>Devops: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdngmbVKX1Tgre699-XLlUA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdngmbVKX1Tgre699-XLlUA</a>
Infosec: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/LiveOverflow" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/c/LiveOverflow</a><p>IDK, I think this might be better listed as an "awesome-x" list
As others said, TY doesn’t seem aligned with the model of technical content. Obviously there’s exceptions like conferences and a handful of individuals.<p>Paid is really the way to go. O’Reilly has a lot of great technical content in video form. They also have live learning sessions.<p><a href="https://www.oreilly.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.oreilly.com</a>
Beginners are probably the target audience for most YT content, across every topic, because it is easy to show people how to do beginner level things. The larger issue with tech content is as soon as a software technology is eclipsed by a new version with breaking features, the older videos are mostly useless to beginners. Experienced software engineers know that there are many solutions to common problems and answers can often have an "it depends" type of answer.<p>A lot of the difficult problems at work are specific to the constraints we have so I would assume the same case for nearly everyone else. Most of these problems have nothing to do with the tech stack or specific language features. In software development the actual programming is the easy part, integrating systems and dealing with scale are the harder parts of the problem.
Quite the opposite, I find it difficult to get technical content <i>not on</i> YouTube.<p>I'm not a fan of videos for learning anything technical. I'd prefer write ups, illustrations and photographs. Videos can be useful sometimes, but what it usually winds up doing for me is slowing down my pace.
That's a question that's really hard to answer in the general case.<p>There are actually some really good YouTubers on some really niche topics. For instance I've found Rahul Nath's videos on Azure Pipelines to be exceptionally helpful: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/rahulnathp" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/user/rahulnathp</a><p>Have you tried searching for content specific to the niche you're interested in? Chances are if it's a topic that's popular on StackOverflow and that's <i>also visual in nature</i>, there's a good Youtube video explaining it. If it's not visual in nature, the probability of your finding a good video decreases because video is likely not the best medium for conveying that information, which decreases the view potential and the incentive to monetize.
My problem with informational videos on YouTube is that the majority of what I see in search results is ten minutes or less, often like two-three minutes. So if I want <i>somewhat</i> more information than ‘I wonder what is that thing anyway’, I pretty much can't get that on YouTube. Like, I'd expect thirty minutes to an hour to be a reasonable length for explaining a topic superficially but in more depth than a dictionary entry.<p>Compare that to the three-part introduction to sound synthesis from the 80s where the dude twiddles knobs for three hours and explains what each of them is doing. Just dialing in one sound takes him ten minutes. It's the best educational video I've seen on YT: <a href="https://youtu.be/atvtBE6t48M" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/atvtBE6t48M</a>
> These days I only see videos about cracking the coding interview<p>Maybe that's because of how many companies have stopped caring if candidates are actually good software developers and just do leetcode tests and call it a day.
It is difficult. The youtube video recommendation algo works in a way where most views videos get are from first time viewers so content creators adjust to make their videos first time viewer friendly. So it has to be up to the channel to deal with that if they want to make "deep" content - e.g. make it a hidden video that is shared in the description of another video.<p>The Applied Science channel is a bright counter example, but these are quite rare.
i have learned to not expect quality content from Youtube. Most channels pump out videos to grow their channel so they all have to play games(clickbait titles, flashy thumbnails, fluff videos to a certain length to please YT algorithm) and now that YT is trying to compete with tiktok, they also encourage channels to have shorter videos, and you cannot explain anything mildly complex in that short period of time.<p>Imo text should be the main source, then use YT videos as supplemental material
I observe there's a lot of good/great technical content from conferences that are not discoverable due to their title/tagging. Rails/Django/JS/etcConf have a lot of technical and non-technical values. Sometimes the most interesting is the ones that isn't directly "on-topic" for the conference. Like James Long talk on CRDT on JSConf. The conference keynotes are also great.
This channel host a lots of different coding conference talks but most of them are hand selected and are of good quality:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/CodingTech" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/c/CodingTech</a><p>This channel maybe the best in terms of quality about low level design. If you are a programmer make sure to checkout his low level design playlist: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/anomaly2104" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/c/anomaly2104</a><p>This is a quality channel to get an intuition for algorithmic thinking: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/vantonspraul" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/c/vantonspraul</a><p>This is a pretty advanced Rust channel: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/JonGjengset" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/c/JonGjengset</a><p>If you are a Frontend developer and you want to understand the primitive stuff, how things work from inside do checkout this channel, contains lots of problems and solution including implementation of vDOM, polyfills for Promise, Async Await and various JS stuff:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0qiieVBpjA6YODgIFf6Afg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0qiieVBpjA6YODgIFf6Afg</a><p>These two are nice intro channels to get into rust:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/timClicks" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/c/timClicks</a>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/RyanLevicksVideos" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/c/RyanLevicksVideos</a><p>If you like maths, do checkout this channel:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/zachstar" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/c/zachstar</a><p>This channel also uploads rarely but the quality of videos is very high, it contains general news and stuff related to Science(Physics, Chemistry, Bilog:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/QuantamagazineOrgNews" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/c/QuantamagazineOrgNews</a><p>If you want to understand modern web layout give this channel a try:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/LayoutLand" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/c/LayoutLand</a><p>If you are any how involved in Crypto, this is a must to subscribe:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/Finematics" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/c/Finematics</a><p>I see I have posted tons of channels but I think these are really good, in terms of quality of content.
I generally dislike consuming computer content in video form, but there is plenty of interesting content out there. Lots of conferences video tape sessions. Plenty of noise but some good things too.<p>E.g. one of my faves: <a href="https://youtu.be/ajGX7odA87k" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/ajGX7odA87k</a>
Lots of conferences have gone online. Looking first at more quality sources like schools and conferences then at YouTube suggestions later can help teach the YouTube suggestion generator more about what you like.
I try to make in depth, no BS content on my channel about Vue.js: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/lachlanmiller" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/c/lachlanmiller</a>
You can check Awesome lists on github, you can find good content there.<p>e.g.
<a href="https://github.com/vityavv/awesome-youtube" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vityavv/awesome-youtube</a>
I find PyCon videos great.<p>But I think you are right, that videos about programming made explicitly for YouTube just aren’t that great.<p>Numberphile is great. Computerphile is … sometimes good. Which makes me think there is just something about YouTube that doesn’t lend itself well to programming.
You have to really find that content, because if you have a specific topic in mind you can definitely find a recent informative video on it.<p>For example currently leading a big technical project where all the tech is new to me. Just went on youtube and searched for "$the_tech_I_want_to_learn 2021" and found playlists of quality videos (like an hour long) where the presenter goes very deep into these topics.<p>Some videos I've found are also by authors of popular books of $the_tech_I_want_to_learn, so that's also awesome to get their insights outside of text.<p>Just avoid "big channels" because just like anything else at a large scale they compromise on many things. Find the channels that are focused on sharing technical information, not milking the monetization system.