Link Farm
This page will be updated not-infrequently with various pages I think are worth visiting. I'm going to start with a rough category system, but would like to implement a tag-based dynamic filtering system in the future.
Woodworking
Ishitani Furniture
Natsuki Ishitani is a Japanese furniture-maker who combines traditional and modern techniques. His videos are superbly edited and free of any dialogue.
He doesn't publish stuff too often — typically 5-10 per year — but the rarity enhances the excitement when a new video is published.
His channel is interesting because he's really a professional furniture-maker who happens to video the commissions he works on. YouTube is not really a major source of income for him and he doesn't monetize his videos.
Check out his YouTube channel.
Stumpy Nubs
James Hamilton is a professional woodworking instructor and produces a ton of educational content. His channel is monetized with affiliation links in product review videos which you can choose not to watch.
The value of this channel is that you really feel like you're in a classroom setting being taught by an expert — a lot of YouTube woodworkers are amateurs who are often confidently incorrect.
Check out his YouTube channel.
Mr. Chickadee
Josh Stevens is a city-boy turned 1800s homesteader. He occasionally uses modern conveniences, but more often than not uses traditional hand-tools and techniques.
If you've never seen someone cut down trees, mill the wood, and build a house from it, here's your chance. The videos are also basically without dialogue and extremely pleasant, though he doesn't publish often.
Check out his YouTube channel and support him on Patreon.
Business
Kalzumeus
Patrick McKenzie writes a lot about startups, business strategy, finance, and systems thinking. I once met him in Tokyo and he's really friendly, too.
Check out his website.
Making
rctestflight
Daniel Riley is a Seattle-area maker who mainly focuses on remote control vehicles with an emphasis on solar power and autonomy. He uses a lot of 3D printing and soldering, but resorts to some hackier materials when called for.
I like that Daniel does not really ooze fake YouTube enthusiasm like so many do. He's like ski-bum vibe meets mechanical engineer subject matter.
Check out his YouTube channel and support him on Patreon.
Modustrial Maker
Mike Clifford was a patent attorney in Chicago before going full-time YouTube maker. His big project the last couple years has been renovating an abandoned commercial building into a dream home / workshop / studio combination.
I started watching around the beginning of the renovation project and never really watched his older videos. They mostly seem like typical YouTube maker fare (skilled-amateur woodworking, metalwork, etc). The abandoned building project is what really sets this channel apart from the thousands of other YouTube makers.
Check out his YouTube channel.
Stuff Made Here
Shane Wighton was a mechanical engineer working at a 3D printer company, but is now a full-time YouTube maker. He specializes in kind of whimsical-yet-seriously-difficult engineering projects. Examples include self-aiming billiards cues, gunpowder-accelerated baseball bats, and chainsaw carving robot arms.
Another interesting part of this channel that you don't see in most other YouTube makers' videos are heavy-duty fabrication processes. Shane basically has a small machinists shop in his house at this point.
Check out his YouTube channel and support him on Patreon.
Matthias Wandel
He's more of a woodworker, but I'm putting him in the Maker category. Most of the stuff he's videoing is focused on engineering the process of woodworking instead of actually doing woodworking.
A ton of his videos are about designing and making better devices that will be used for woodworking. So it's more of a meta-woodworking channel, hence the Maker category assignment.
Something refreshing about his channel is that he's just an unabashed nerd.
Check out his YouTube channel and excellent website.
Jaimie Mantzel
Jaimie is the YouTuber I have been following longer than any other. He's been putting videos on YouTube since 2007, and I started watching in 2009 or so.
He's a self taught mechanical/electrical engineer sort of guy who is also gung-ho about manual labor. He's a bit of a mad scientist.
The first half of his channel was mostly about building a giant robot spider-tank at his Vermont mountaintop dome house that he built himself from mostly-recycled materials.
The second half of his channel is when he got fed up with American consumer culture and moved to a small island he bought in Panama.
He's pretty eccentric and has some strong views about the powers that be. Some of his philosophical ramblings may not be to everyone's taste. Nonetheless, his channel is absolutely unique in its scope (15 years of his life!) and genuineness.
Check out his YouTube channel and support him on Patreon.
Space
NASASpaceflight
The leader in professional-ish space industry coverage. It's still pretty amateur compared to an "actual" news company, but that's part of the appeal. It's not a media company pretending to be space nerds — it's space nerds pretending to be a media company.
An absolute must-follow if you like to keep up-to-date with things like NASA projects, ISS updates, SpaceX news, etc.
Check out their YouTube channel.
Scott Manley
Scott Manley is an engineer for Apple in California, but originally hails from Scotland — he has a very listenable accent to prove it.
He has an insanely wide breath of knowledge for someone not working in the aerospace industry, and presents it charismatically.
He tends to cover more than just recent space news which is nice. It's a bit of an anti-pattern in some other space YouTubers to just regurgitate what happened at the SpaceX facility in Boca Chica that week.
Check out his YouTube channel and support him on Patreon.
Everyday Astronaut
Tim Dodd is a fairly average guy who got really, really into space and space history. His dorky enthusiasm is a lot of fun.
Sometimes he gets into the aforementioned space news anti-pattern, but posts enough original content to stand out from the pack.
Check out his YouTube channel and support him on Patreon.
SpaceX
Gotta follow the official SpaceX channel. They have very crispy live streams of all their launches.
Jiu-jitsu
Coach Brian
Brian Peterson is a grappler with an eclectic background — mainly wrestling, MMA, and no-gi jiu-jitsu. He's really great as a coach and explains things with detail and enthusiasm.
He also tends to show unorthodox techniques that are nonetheless effective. He has plenty of great, standard technique videos too, but the real value is the stuff he shows that other instructors aren't showing.
Check out his YouTube channel and support him on Patreon.
Keenan Cornelius
Keenan is the first online BJJ instructor whose teaching style really clicked for me. I like that he isn't afraid to question convention and tradition.
I am not a fan of some of his techniques (e.g. lapel guard), but his approach to more "standard" positions is top-notch.
He dropped out of highschool to pursue jiu-jitsu full time and is among the best in the world. His breadth of knowledge is extremely impressive.
Check out his YouTube channel.
Jon Thomas
Jon is probably my favorite instructor for learning standard, modern BJJ. He doesn't teach any seriously unorthodox techniques like Coach Brian or Keenan.
He has a clear teaching style and covers the most important points succinctly.
Check out his YouTube channel.
Programming
Jon Gjengset
Jon's videos and livestreams about the Rust programming language are among the best you can find.
He mainly covers intermediate-to-advanced concepts in the language that are not typically covered by most "intro to Rust" type creators.
He's also technically a coworker of mine at AWS, though we've only interacted briefly.
Check out his YouTube channel or buy his book.
tom7
Tom Murphy is a bit of a mad scientist programmer. He tends to take an idea and run with it to the logical extreme. In one project, he trained a neural network to predict the uppercase variant of a lowercase letter, then ran the network on already-uppercase letters to produce upper-uppercase letters.
Check out his YouTube channel or personal website.
CodeParade
This guy pushes game engines to their limits with the crazy geometry of his hyperbolic-space video game, Hyperbolica.
He's worth the follow just for the extremely cool main project. He also posts random experiments and neat stuff that the kind of person who would build a hyperbolic-space video game would find interesting.
Check out his YouTube channel and support him on Patreon.
Economics
Money & Macro
Dr. Joeri Schasfoort is an economics professor turned YouTube educator.
His economics videos are a breath of fresh air compared to most of the fare on YouTube which tends to be ideologically driven. He places a strong emphasis on empirical data rather than political pandering.
Check out his YouTube channel and support him on Patreon.
Byrne Hobart
Byrne is a financial analyst turned writer.
His writing is particularly interesting to me because it was my first exposure to financial systems thinking that I could relate to.
As a software engineer in the data storage space, I mainly analogize the world as a series of buffers and packets that all have various latencies and throughputs. A coworker and I were once at a restaurant that had one line to order and another line to pay. We spent our time in line debating if the two-line system actually improved throughput and what effects it may have on tail latency.
Byrne's essays illustrated the finance-equivalent lens to my view of the world. Where I see packets and buffers, he sees volatility of options contracts and discounted cash flows.
Check him out on Medium.
Urban design
Not Just Bikes
Jason Slaughter moved from Canada to the Netherlands (and a dozen places in between). He provides a great perspective on different urban design features based on personal experience and research.
Check out his YouTube or Nebula channel and support him on Patreon.
City Beautiful
His videos contain fewer opinions than the aforementioned Not Just Bikes channel, as he isn't just an enthusiast, but an actual urban planning professional. The content is fairly similar, though City Beautiful covers more topics than transportation.
Check out his YouTube or Nebula channel and support him on Patreon.
City Nerd
Similar to City Beautiful, just different content. Has a lot of top 10 lists of various interesting urban features such as "top 10 highway lids", "top 10 urban aqueducts", etc.
Check out his YouTube channel.
Shifter
Calgary native Tom Babin runs this channel all about bike commuting. Lots of talk about strategy, gear, and urban design.
Check out his YouTube channel.
Technology
Boston Dynamics
The world leaders in humanoid robotics. They don't post much deep technical content, but the demonstration videos on their YouTube are still impressive and worth watching.
comma.ai
Comma is a self-driving car company. In their own words, Tesla is the iPhone of self-driving and they will be the Android.
A lot of their YouTube content has technical content about neural network architecture and training infrastructure.
Miscellaneous
Mr. Subaru
This guy is an absolute expert in all things Subaru. The main source of content for how to maintain my imported Subaru Sambar kei truck.
Check out his YouTube channel.
ChessNetwork
Jerry is a National Master and publishes entertaining and instructional chess videos.
Check out his YouTube channel and support him on Patreon.