Ask YC: Your best programming websites/blogs
Curious to see apart from news.yc what do people read on a daily or occasional basis (apart from what you find on news.yc) ? These could be general ones or language specific.
- comp.python.announce - http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.announce
- Daily Python-URL - http://www.pythonware.com/daily
For java/xml:
- Cafe au Lait: http://www.ibiblio.org/java/
- Cafe con Leche: http://www.cafeconleche.org/
Misc:
- Hack the Planet - http://wmf.editthispage.com
- Geek Press - http://www.geekpress.com
You may notice the sites are not always exclusively about "programming". Why? Well I find that a lot of the best stuff occurs at the edges of programming/development in lots of different areas. This wide scanning of sources is an attempt to avoid the narrow focus of any one "technology" and to see how "stuff" is being applied. Ultimately I'm just as interested in building stuff than just merely playing with cogs & gears. The cross-over of technology and technique is at the edges. Exactly where new stuff & ideas emerge.
a) Newsgroups
The real source of Internet news, plain-old news-groups. Rowdy, without pictures but the source of infinite detail. I don't scan them as much in news-mode but still flick through them:
- news:comp.lang.* (perl python core language)
- news:comp.unix.admin
- news:lucky.openbsd.misc (obsd chatter)
- news:linux.kernel
- news:rec.games.programmer (where all the good programming used to be discussed)
- http://groups.google.com/group/webpy
- http://groups.google.com/group/django-users
b) Web1/1.5: sites & blogs Every day I log onto these sites & scan them.
- hackernews via my summary http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/hackerid/
- http://techmeme.com (broad brush)
Then if I get bored I go and take a look at the following urls or listen via c) ...
- http://factoryjoe.com/ (standards, usability & bleeding edge)
- http://www.plasticbag.org/ (ui, standards, application)
- http://www.hackdiary.com/ (bleeding edge, standards)
- http://jeffcroft.com/ (django)
- http://willotoons.com/ (tech in biz)
- http://chrisbrogan.com/ (social tech)
- http://www.valuesofn.com/blog (extracting meaning app)
- http://www.artima.com/weblogs/index.jsp?blogger=guido (BDFL, creator of python)
c) Web2.0: Twitter & Flickr, etc
I've been on flickr for quite a while and when twitter started I added mostly my flickr contacts on twitter. So I'm hooked into twitter (and flickr) so a quick grab from my twit list shows quite a few ppl who blog and write. So you can listen to the cross chatter and see references to articles, topics or interesting things. You don't have to know them all. The direct line of contact means you can listen, ask questions, clarify information & facts. [0] For example my list of the first 20 twits or so include:
Watching the "alpha geeks" ....
Biz Stone , Blaine Cook , rael , veen , davegray , Sacca , Ross , Justin Williams , Mr Messina , Dave Winer , Bon , Scott Rafer , Chris Brogan , julien , Lachlan Hardy , 47teen , Jeremy Keith , Andre Torrez , Hicksy , Tom Coates , Matt Biddulph , Todd Jordan , Paul Boag ... etc
[0] Like the time I did a quick quote check on Chris Sacca & got a response back via twitter in a couple of hours.
http://blogs.azulsystems.com/cliff/ (JVM hacking, concurrency, non-blocking hashtable)
http://osteele.com/ (javascript, functional programming)
http://glinden.blogspot.com/ (personalization, collective intelligence)
I've never found a need to be updated daily on any one language, so I read more of the meta-discussion of being a programmer rather than about languages themselves. When I want to figure out a language issue, I just google for it.
http://planet.ajaxian.com/ which is actually an agglomeration of lots of other feeds is great for keeping up with company launches and industry rumors, but a bit heavy (over 100 posts/day usually during the week)
and a few others ...