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Learning Resources

Courses, tutorials, and communities I return to regularly, organized by subject. I am always learning, and these are the places I keep coming back to.

February 2026 Updated September 2026 ~2 min read
Contents
  1. General
  2. Design & Motion
  3. Web Development
  4. Architecture
  5. ML & AI
  6. 3D
  7. Management

General

I check these two sources daily: YouTube for depth and hckrnews.com for breadth.

YouTube
Conference talks, tutorials, and technical explainers
hckrnews.com
Curated HN front page, less noise

Design & Motion

Design skills build on each other. These resources cover UI fundamentals, motion design, and the business of web design.

Flux Academy
Web design & freelancing
School of Motion
Motion design courses covering After Effects, Cinema 4D, and animation principles
Learn UI Design
Erik Kennedy's practical, opinionated guide to UI and UX fundamentals
Josh W. Comeau
Tutorials and interactive articles about CSS and React

I start with the simplest tools, usually Inkscape, Krita, or Figma. I move to Illustrator, Photoshop, or After Effects when I need their extra features. I learn the principles first, then the software.

Web Development

Web development changes quickly. These two resources have stayed useful as the ecosystem has changed.

Joy of React
Josh Comeau's React course, with an emphasis on mental models and syntax
Frontend Masters
Expert-taught courses on JavaScript, React, TypeScript, Node, CSS, and related topics

Architecture

These resources cover distributed systems, system design, and lessons from running services at scale.

Amazon Builders' Library
Distributed systems patterns documented by Amazon engineers
YouTube
System design channels, re:Invent talks, and architecture explainers

ML & AI

The field changes every week. These resources help me follow it without reading everything.

swyx/ai-notes
A community-maintained knowledge base for AI papers, trends, and tools
DeepLearning.AI
Andrew Ng's AI & machine learning courses
YouTube
Andrej Karpathy, 3Blue1Brown, Yannic Kilcher
Deep Learning with Python
François Chollet's hands-on guide to deep learning with Keras
The Welch Labs Illustrated Guide to AI
A 376-page visual guide from perceptrons through attention and image and video generation, with exercises, code, and companion videos
An Illustrated Guide to AI Agents
Maarten Grootendorst and Jay Alammar explain tools, memory, planning, reasoning models, multimodal systems, and multi-agent collaboration through visual examples

3D

I use Blender for 3D work. These two resources cover the path from beginner exercises to competent project work.

Polygon Runway
Beginner Blender tutorials built around stylized projects
CG Cookie
Blender training in modeling, texturing, and animation

Management

Engineering leadership is its own discipline. These are the resources I've found most honest and useful.

Rands in Repose
Michael Lopp's practical and funny writing about engineering leadership
HN: Best management books
A community-curated reading list for managers at every level