Ask HN: Which companies' tech blogs do you read? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which companies' tech blogs do you read?

27 pointsggregoire13 comments

In total I follow around 130 different RSS feeds (just for tech blogs). These range for esoteric scheme blogs to Netflix, Uber, Facebook Engineering. It came to a point where I had a really hard time prioritizing everything, so I implemented a fairly naive algorithm to rank them. I found the most interesting stuff was coming from FAANG, so I would give their engineering blog posts a few extra points (multiply by 2). I really like Julia Evans and always learn something from them, so her blog is currently a multiple of 5 for me (the highest).

I have been toying around with making this aggregation a weekly newsletter, but currently it's just a landing page and an Elixir/Phoenix app (what I use to keep track of my RSS feeds). If anyone's interested: https://unicorndigest.com

Because I have not settled yet, what feed/RSS reader do you use

I tried multiple feed readers but didn't find anything satisfying or simple enough. These days I use a Python script that runs as a daily cron and sends me a plain text email of new posts from the sites to which I have subscribed.

A custom Elixir/Phoenix application I wrote. I'd recommend Feedly for anyone who has a small amount of feeds they follow (I think I have over 200 different sources at the moment), but I need custom ordering that Feedly doesn't offer which is why I wrote my own.

Would you mind sharing, I didn't find it in your github.

I was thinking about Elixir recently anyway ;)

How much manual review do you have to do to keep this going?

Depends on my interests at the time but I prefer the blogs where the tech is open source so mostly Twitter[1] and LinkedIn[2] for me. I also follow Airbnb[3] primarily for their blogs on Data and ML (the area in which I work). Have occasionally looked at Uber and Netflix for some of the posts related to Big Data and ML.

[1] https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us.html [2] https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog [3] https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering

Quick link of post mortem blogposts: https://gist.github.com/cheapRoc/d9e73fe05480330c1e36410cbdf...

The best company blogs I see are ones that have their own open source projects. Like Facebook. Where they break off a generally usable piece of their codebase into a library.

Nothing beats a nice version release with an update on all the features and improvements it brings.

https://reactjs.org/blog/2014/02/20/react-v0.9.html

So I consider open source subsidiaries as "company tech blogs". Let's try to keep things purely to blogs:

https://stripe.com/blog/engineering

Favorite post was their post mortem: https://web.archive.org/web/20160126093909/https://support.s...

This was Stripe's 2015 outage with the database index change (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10365798) I presumed it was an index involving customer ID, but it wasn't specific.

I don't necessarily read all of them, but ICYMI there is a curated list of engineering blogs - https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs

None except I want to buy their stock.

Lately: https://jobs.zalando.com/tech/blog/

CloudFlare occasionally: it is consistently interesting.

Persona's (MySQL/DB related) occasionally.

Etsy

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