Ask HN: What programming blogs do you follow? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What programming blogs do you follow?

407 pointsin977 comments

Recently I found Julia Evans blog, which is great read for someone wanting the have a broader knowledge of software engineering, operating systems and related themes.

What other similar blogs do you guys follow as well?

Julia Evans blog, for those interested is

https://jvns.ca/

View on HN

Julia Evans' blog is one of my favorites! It was a big inspiration for starting my own blog (https://andythemoron.com). I also love High Scalability and Dan Luu's blog which have been mentioned in other comments.

I "follow" several which are mostly defunct, but in terms of blogs that still feature active updates:

Evan Klitze's blog: lots of topics around Linux, C++, etc. https://eklitzke.org/

Sutter's Mill: lots of "state of the world" for C++, but also context, history, etc. https://herbsutter.com/

IT Hare: C++, game programming http://ithare.com/

The Erlangelist: Erlang/Elixir http://theerlangelist.com/

null program: lots of miscellaneous topics http://nullprogram.com/

Fluent C++: the name speaks for itself http://www.fluentcpp.com/

Another Programmer's Blog: Linux, C, C++, C#, MSSQL https://www.stev.org/

As a nod to HN I confess its front page acts as a wonderful filter. So while I do not follow blogs, I get a really good stuff from here.

Seconded. I also subscribe some of Cooper Press *-weekly digests https://cooperpress.com/publications/ The idea is the same: a curated list of links to some posts on a zillion of different blogs.

Yeah Cooper Press are fantastic, particuarly JavaScript Weekly, Ruby Weekly and React Status.

It would be nice if HN provided a list of the user's most upvoted websites. That way, you can easily figure out what your favorite blog is :)

Same here. I haven't been able to find an RSS reader I love since Google Reader went under.

I'm loving all the blog recommendations I get here, but I don't see how I can follow the content reliably like I can with my favorite podcasts.

Have you tried Feedly?

Yeah, it didn't take for reasons I can't really recall offhand. Maybe I'll give it another shot.

Second that. I tried so many readers after GR was gone and Feedly for the bill.

The key features I need is "read when scrolled" and a clean interface

I've been using NewsBlur since Reader shut down. It's not as good but it's passable.

try https://www.goread.io, it is very similar to what Google Reader was.

Please try NewsBlur, thank me later :) https://www.newsblur.com

Can I thank you or is it too late? :)

Here's a dump of the "Programming" folder from my RSS reader:

Aphyr's (aka the guy behind the Jepsen distributed system test series): https://aphyr.com/

Fred Herbert, the author of Learn You Some Erlang: http://ferd.ca/

Eevee, who posts a mishmash of stuff about programming in general but these days is mostly focussed on games: https://eev.ee/

Tef/Programming is Terrible, which features strong opinions about programming/programmers: http://programmingisterrible.com

Matt Kline, who posts mainly about low-level stuff and embedded systems: http://bitbashing.io/

Evan Miller, whose blog topics are wide-ranging: http://www.evanmiller.org/

tptacek, who can be seen tirelessly defending common sense in the comments on this very site: https://sockpuppet.org

Sonniesedge, who talks about front-end stuff and the human impact of programming: https://sonniesedge.co.uk/blog/

Carin Meier, who posts most often, but not exclusively, about Clojure: http://gigasquidsoftware.com/

Also Julia Evans, as mentioned in the OP.

I found the Sonniesedge blog to rely quite heavily on expletives and anger. It's a shame: there are some great articles in there, but it becomes hard to read.

This, for example: https://sonniesedge.co.uk/blog/progressive-enhancement

I follow Eevee on twitter, love their content, for some reason I always find it inspiring for my own projects

Not a blog but daily articles from Medium bloggers by language, much better:

https://medium.com/tag/swift/latest

https://medium.com/tag/kotlin/latest

That's a great way to discover interesting content. Thanks for posting!

I'm actually surprised no one mentioned these two

Eli Bendersky http://eli.thegreenplace.net/ Jeff Preshing http://preshing.com/

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

Mike Ash has started posting again after a long hiatus:

https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/

The URL is very misleading, his blog is about Objective-C (and now Swift) internals, in a very loose way like an "Old New Thing" for Apple's tech stack (w/o the insider knowledge parts, he's not an Apple employee).

I follow https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

Wayyyyy too many :)

A few months back I wrote a Reddit comment listing "just" the high-quality React-related blogs that I read : https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/5t8loz/what_are_yo... .

I read a lot more besides that. To pick out just a few:

- Scott Hanselman: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/

- Robert O'Callahan: http://robert.ocallahan.org/

- Henrik Warne: https://henrikwarne.com/

- Andrew Wulf ("The Codist"): http://thecodist.com/

- Lin Clark: https://code-cartoons.com/ . (Her actual blog hasn't been updated in a while, but she's also posted many in-depth articles to Mozilla organization blogs over the last few months.)

And while I don't think

How do you manage to keep yourself updated on all of these?

Easy - RSS feeds :) I use BazQux Reader, which is basically a modern incarnation of Google Reader. Simple, works, and totally worth the $20 subscription.

All the blogs I just listed, plus a whole bunch more, are in my "Programming - High Quality" folder - anything new in that folder is likely to be pretty good, but the total amount of traffic is relatively low. I also subscribe to several blog aggregators like EchoJS, JavascriptKicks, DZone, Planet Python, etc. Those go in a separate folder that has a lot more volume, and I skim the titles to pick out what's interesting. Then there's the "General" category, and so on.

It's a shame RSS feeds seem to have been mostly ignored after the death of Google Reader. They're a _fantastic_ way to stay up to date with a wide variety of sites.

Surprised to see http://2ality.com/ missing. First place I go for every new JavaScript lang feature/proposal.

https://www.highscalability.com - good devops articles and link roundups

+1 ; especially for the "Stuff The Internet Says On Scalability" Friday digest.

Here is a similar question from a few months ago, which resulted in a pretty great list of blogs and twitters:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13520891

Robert Martin: http://blog.cleancoder.com/

https://eklitzke.org/ http://www.onebigfluke.com/

Not as frequently updated as it used to be, but: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/

Mostly Haskell-related: http://www.stephendiehl.com/posts.html

I have created this as a side project of mine :)

https://discoverdev.io

It's a curated and tagged list of company blogposts - published every weekday (or whenever I get 5-10 good links for the day)! As of now it is limited to only engineering blogs.

To know more, visit : https://www.discoverdev.io/about

Please consider adding hyperlinks to the articles themselves in your RSS entries: right now it's a useless bullet point list of titles: https://www.discoverdev.io/rss.xml

Holy! I didn't notice that at all. I thought I was already adding hyperlinks! Thanks for letting me know :)

When he was updating it, shakes fist

http://fabiensanglard.net/

Dan Luu has a list of programming blogs you might like: https://danluu.com/programming-blogs/. The rest of his blog is good too!

a few of my favorite blogs:

- http://blog.acolyer.org for fantastic daily summaries of CS papers.

- http://stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/ -- she has a business creating a new compression algorithm and I love reading about it

- https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ is pure gold for weird debugging stories

- https://accidentallyquadratic.tumblr.com/ is always a fun read

- http://wingolog.org/ on building compilers

- http://composition.al/blog -- Lindsey Kuper on her programming languages research

- aphyr's blog on distributed systems, of course

- https://charity.wtf/

- http://www.pgbovine.net/writings.htm -- Philip Guo is a CS professor whose blog on his experiences in academia I really like

- http://whilefalse.blogspot.com by Camille Fournier, mostly on engineering management

- http://larahogan.me/blog/ by Lara Hogan, on engineering management

Also I think this comment from Dan's blog (https://danluu.com/about/) is very true and important:

> I view that as a sign there’s a desperate shortage of understandable explanation of technical topics. There’s nothing here that most of my co-workers don’t know (with the exception of maybe three or four posts where I propose novel ideas). It’s just that they don’t blog and I do. I’m not going to try to convince you to start writing a blog, since that has to be something you want to do, but I will point out that there’s a large gap that’s waiting to be filled by your knowledge. When I started writing this blog, I figured almost no one would ever read it; sure Joel Spolsky and Steve Yegge created widely read blogs, but that was back when almost no one was blogging. Now that there are millions of blogs, there’s just no way to start a new blog and get noticed. Turns out that’s not true.

I really think there is a shortage of understandable explanations of technical topics, and I see new people writing great posts clarifying complicated technical topics all the time. And I find people really do notice/appreciate it. So if you're excited about blogging, maybe do it :)

The Morning Paper (http://blog.acolyer.org) is the only source mentioned so far that I go out of my way to read. Highly recommended.

I second Andy wingo's wingolog.org . By far the blog that has helped me the most in bridging academia and practical implementation (to be fair though, I have been working a lot with cml and delimited continuations lately, which has been a big theme the last years).

https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs

There's also an OPML file that you can import into Feedly.

The Morning Brew: "a daily .NET software development link blog published by Chris Alcock"

It's like a daily readers digest of software development stuff. And the tagline just quoted is a little out of date - it's got a strong .NET leaning but that's not the only thing on there.

http://blog.cwa.me.uk/

I read from https://robots.thoughtbot.com/.

Not strictly programming, but Troy Hunt on Security (https://www.troyhunt.com/) is really good.

He's the guy behind Have I Been Pwned (https://haveibeenpwned.com/).

http://www.catonmat.net is excellent.

I'm also a fan of the comics the author Peter Krumins puts out https://comic.browserling.com/

Here are a bunch of blogs from my RSS reader that I think are worth reading. Some of them haven't updated in a while, but the archives may be worth a look anyway.

* Blogs with a math focus:

http://blog.sigfpe.com

http://bit-player.org

http://mathr.co.uk/blog/

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/

* Blogs with a programming languages focus:

https://existentialtype.wordpress.com

https://bluishcoder.co.nz

http://blog.ezyang.com

http://akkartik.name

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org

http://mrale.ph

* Blogs with a UI design focus:

http://www.brandonwalkin.com/blog/

http://ignorethecode.net/blog/

http://interuserface.net

* Blogs with a graphics / 3D rendering focus:

http://c0de517e.blogspot.com

http://diaryofagraphicsprogrammer.blogspot.com

https://directtovideo.wordpress.com

http://graphicrants.blogspot.com

http://www.reedbeta.com

http://www.realtimerendering.com/blog/

https://blog.demofox.org

http://eelpi.gotdns.org/blog.wiki.html

* Other interesting / more general programming blogs (many of these have a "systems" focus):

http://danluu.com

http://ewontfix.com

http://chneukirchen.org/blog/

http://neverworkintheory.org

http://apenwarr.ca/log/

https://www.snellman.net/blog/

https://www.pvk.ca

http://psy-lob-saw.blogspot.com

https://randomascii.wordpress.com

http://fastcompression.blogspot.com

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com

http://blog.plover.com

http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/

For those who like newsletters delivered to their inbox:

https://github.com/vredniy/awesome-newsletters

Enough programming news for a lifetime, or two.

Eric Lippert's blog https://ericlippert.com/ He used to write about C#, mostly. Now he is into functional programming. Awesome content.

I am a big fan of the bolt blog.

https://blog.bolt.io/

Its a hardware/hardware startup blog written by what looks like a full(ish) stack hardware VC.

I listen to a few podcasts but don't religiously follow any one particular person on blogs. I just find blog posts about what i want to do and learn from that, maybe poke around a while after.

If you can read Chinese, Meituan-Dianping Engineering Blog is a must-read: https://tech.meituan.com/

I keep a list of blogs I follow as a GitHub repo :

https://github.com/learn-anything/blogs

I've been impressed by the Sourcegraph blog lately:

https://about.sourcegraph.com/blog/

http://codesimplicity.com/ for fundamentals of software design and improving code bases

Airbnb Engineering & Data Science https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering

Paul Graham - www.paulgraham.com

Eli Bendersky http://eli.thegreenplace.net/

FreeCodeCamp/Quincy Larson on Medium

Since i do a lot of image stuff with OpenCV pyimagesearch.com

Windytan (Oona Räisänen), absolutely phenomenal hacker: http://www.windytan.com/

https://reprog.wordpress.com/ is a great one i discovered recently.

If you like Julia Evans style you may also like Charity Majors aka @mipsytipsy on twitter https://charity.wtf/

Also I use the open source Django project Newsblur as my RSS reader, and follow Samuel's blog: http://blog.newsblur.com/

A couple others I like:

https://watirmelon.blog

https://martinfowler.com

https://www.nayuki.io/

Lots of high quality code examples in a variety of languages.

Most of the ones I read are covered here. Would like to add http://dev.to

I run an aggregator for ruby-related blogs and other news feeds.

http://rubyland.news

https://blog.regehr.org for undefined behavior lovers.

http://www.bfilipek.com/ C++ stuff

The Practical Dev https://dev.to/

some machine learning blog I like to follow is http://karpathy.github.io

The Technical Blog of James https://ttboj.wordpress.com/

Source: Author

- aphyr

- scott hansleman

- coding horror

- decyphering glyph

- eric lippert

Let's see. Often when I find something interesting on HN or Reddit I might see if the author writes other interesting posts and subscribe to their blog on Feedly. I currently have a few hundred sources that I subscribe to so it might be a bit hard for me to choose which "blogs" I'd promote. But there are some:

- https://blog.codinghorror.com/

- http://www.pentadact.com/

- http://procworld.blogspot.no/

- https://moviecode.tumblr.com/

- http://hackaday.com/

- https://research.googleblog.com/

- https://gpuofthebrain.com/

- https://xkcd.com/

- http://oglaf.com/

This is an almost random selection of some of the blogs that I subscribe to.

+1 for Julia Evans blog

www.simform.com/blog - on IoT & product engineering