Ask HN: What are the best developer/hacker focused blogs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are the best developer/hacker focused blogs?

31 pointsBrandonWatson33 comments

I am sure we all read Coding Horror, Spolsky, Zed and Hanselman, but can this community help me identify some of the other great developer/hacker focused bloggers?

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Currently in my RSS reader:

* Coding the Wheel - http://www.codingthewheel.com/

* Good Math, Bad Math - http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/

* Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP - http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/

* Polymath Programmer - http://polymathprogrammer.com/

* The Endeavor - http://www.johndcook.com/blog/

* Programming Praxis - http://programmingpraxis.com/

* Pragmatic Bookshelf News - http://www.pragprog.com/news/

* Sutter's Mill - http://herbsutter.wordpress.com/

* Schneier on Security - http://www.schneier.com/blog/

nice .. thanks

Second on Coding the Wheel.

> I am sure we all read Coding Horror, Spolsky, Zed and Hanselman

Not so much.

But how do you find out about the latest FogBugz release?!?!

HN seems insistent on keeping me up to date about it. ;)

Agreed. HN is the best aggregator for hacker/dev content

The post you replied to appears to be referencing FogBugz specifically.

Clearly a Microsoft person. A quick peek at his profile actually says, "I work at Microsoft. I don't want anyone to be confused on that point."

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I do find it funny that he put Zed in that list.

I like Steve Yegge's archive, especially the original "internal amazon blog" (2004-2005): http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/blog-rants

Planet Apache can be interesting (an aggregator of apache committers). Extreme variation in quality, but James Duncan Davidson and Sam Ruby and a few others make it all worth it: http://planet.apache.org/committers/

Anton Chuvakin for security: http://chuvakin.blogspot.com/

Sam Ruby has his own Planet set up too; I find it to be pretty relevant: http://planet.intertwingly.net

What I do is use sites like Hacker news to discover other sites - if I like a story, I'll check the rest of the site to see if the author writes consistently good stuff, and if so subscribe.

I've found a lot of cool stuff that way.

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

I just recently started reading that site (thanks to HN). Wow. I've never felt so inadequate as a programmer.

Yeah its a great site whenever you feel your ego getting to big, it knocks you down a few points

I don't have any specific blogs for you at the moment, but go with someone who is smart but unknown. Unknowns have to produce good content to stay afloat. At this point Coding Horror and Spolsky can get away with just about anything because of their success. It's too easy to assume that the big names are correct without critically thinking about their words.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=99426

The best blogs for me, are those that are not for the great hacker public, but for smaller audiences. Blogs about mathematics, data mining, computer vision, and so on. Coding Horror, Spolsky and the alike only talk about generalities and aren't really useful to me.

What computer vision blogs do you read?

Do you mind sharing? :D

Also, datamining blogs? :)

http://followthedata.wordpress.com is one

Sites I like from my feeds, aiming for variety:

* Joseph Miklojcik (emacs, lisp, languages) http://jfm3-repl.blogspot.com/

* Mauricio Fernández (functional, with ocaml focus) http://eigenclass.org/R2/

* Colin Percival (tarsnap, freebsd security) http://www.daemonology.net/blog/

* Matthew Garrett (mobile linux, power management) http://mjg59.livejournal.com

* Brad Fitzpatrick (memcached, pubhubsubbub) http://advogato.org/person/bradfitz/diary.html

* Chris Neukirchen's Trivium (all links, great jumping point) http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/

I enjoy DadHacker a lot, partly because I enjoy anecdotes, but mostly because Landon writes extremely well and seems like a nice guy without an agenda (unlike Joel and friends). I also used to read _why's blog from time to time before he vanished.

Mostly I just follow HN and proggit. I'm not very big on blogs.

A few of my favorites that I didn't see people list; note that many of these are sort of combined personal blogs and programming-related (like mine - http://joeganley.com):

- http://wilshipley.com

- http://lbrandy.com

- http://nedbatchelder.com

- http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/

Raymond Chen's very Windows focused The Old New Thing - http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/

pkrumins has an especially enriching blog

http://catonmat.net

Two I have in my reader:

Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP - http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/

Igvata - http://www.igvita.com/ (Ruby based, sometimes too terse)

http://research.swtch.com/

Information Aesthetics - http://infosthetics.com/