The festive season has begun. This is the most wonderful time of the year! But it is cold and gray in the Northern Hemisphere now and many people will spend forthcoming holidays on a sofa in the living room. What will you be doing? Instead of watching yet another TV series or Christmas movie, I’d like to suggest you choosing something different this time.

For example, there is a huge collection of great educational videos from TED conferences. They are usually short, but always very inspiring. To start with, check 25 most popular talks or try these, which are my favorites:

• Your body language shapes who you are by Amy Cuddy
• How fear of nuclear power is hurting the environment by Michael Shellenberger
• Got a meeting? Take a walk by Nilofer Merchant

If you are into programming, you can’t miss this famous talk by Bret Victor:

Check out his other talks too.

Many big software development conferences publish videos, including Devoxx, GoTo, NDC and many others. If you don’t know where to start, look for prominent speakers, like Venkat Subramaniam, Kevlin Henney or my JetBrains colleagues Hadi Hariri and Trisha Gee. Choose any of their talks and you wouldn’t be disappointed.

Also try searching YouTube on a topic you’re interested in, and you’ll find lots of interesting content there. It is also a great opportunity to learn something new: watch some introductory video and decide whether you need to learn that technology or framework deeper.

Speaking of education, you can replace weekly TV series with online courses. Free courses are available on many platforms, including Coursera, Udacity, and edX. I recently attended courses about Machine Learning and Cryptography there and can definitely recommend these. Udacity offers many courses in collaboration with leading vendors. For example, there is Android Basics course co-created by Google. And on edX I’ve seen good language courses.

There is one more thing I’d like to share:

If you want something you’ve never had, then you’ve got to do something you’ve never done.

I cannot agree more. If you do New Year Resolutions take this one.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! See you in 2017.