Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?

451 points by carlmungz ↗ HN

141 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] thread
Depends what you want to get out of them. I find some are mostly focused around some of the more unique/cool challenges they come across (Google[1][2], Slack[3]), and others are more about how they solve the engineering challenges they face through software and/or about their dev process (Uber[4], Twitter[5]). Some are mix of the two (Dropbox[6], Netflix[7]).

[1] https://developers.googleblog.com/

[2] http://research.googleblog.com/

[3] https://slack.engineering

[4] https://eng.uber.com/

[5] https://blog.twitter.com/engineering

[6] https://tech.dropbox.com

[7] http://techblog.netflix.com/

Although I don't like them, Cloudflare have a really good blog.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/

Curious why you don't like Cloudflare.
One reason to dislike them is that they're the NSA's favourite MITMiddleman.
Do we have proof?
This is an American company that strips SSL from many, many medium value targets; if they aren't thoroughly owned then the surveillance state is being negligent.

A paranoid man would go even further than that and assume that monitored DDoS-proofing goes hand in hand with targetted, state-sponsored DDoS attacks.

I don't dislike them because of shitty services or customer support or anything. In fact, in those regards they are pretty awesome. It's just a privacy thing. For details see the other responses.
Square have an excellent blog: https://medium.com/square-corner-blog

Square put out a lot of fantastic libraries, and much of their output is basically essential for Android.

crossfilter.js is incredibly useful for building interactive dashboards
Digital Ocean has some quality posts I've found from Google, though I don't actively follow the blog.

https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/

Agreed. When we were setting up a server at work we found their how-to articles particularly useful.
I believe the digital ocean articles are community-written, unless they also have a corporate blog that I'm unaware of.
I believe the digital ocean articles are community-written, unless they also have a corporate blog that I'm unaware of.
I have to agree that the posts I've read from DO have all been of the highest quality regarding ops-stuff. I think the bigger companies could use same kind of dedication to user-friendliness and focus more on making their communities better.
Came here to upvote DO. Most of the companies mentioned here write articles about their products, infra & engineering marvels.What makes DO different is that their articles are written for the end user.They have some of the most helpful articles on setting up servers, from start to end, with examples. Although not all posts are written by their own engineers [1] (nothing wrong, just saying).

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to-write

Their posts rank well, higher than Stack Overflow for 'how do I install this on Ubuntu' articles plus you know the instructions are highly likely to work without excessive featuritis (certain how to perfect server guides spring to mind).

Along the way one is likely to get a free-ish 'droplet' at some time and the combination of the articles and the occasional droplet use makes one a customer almost by a process of osmosis - it becomes hard to not like Digital Ocean.

I do feel that they may have lost the momentum on the articles though, or maybe I am just not doing so many Ubuntu setup things, whatever the reason I have not used their articles a great deal over the last year.

Does anyone else think they need a bit of a reboot and to update/crank out more articles?

I'd like to suggest my company blog: https://blog.serverdensity.com

As an example, our frontend engineering team just wrote up a series of posts about implementing graphing in React, migrating from Redux:

- https://blog.serverdensity.com/time-series-charts-react-redu...

- https://blog.serverdensity.com/building-a-color-engine-for-g...

- https://blog.serverdensity.com/lessons-learned-implementing-...

And I wrote about recent backend changes to our time series storage: https://blog.serverdensity.com/time-series-data-opentsdb-big...

Server Density was always a great blog. Second this one!
I actually really like many of the blogs at Microsoft. It's a bit of a mixed bag, but there's some gems in there.

Raymond Chen's blog[1] in particular was good enough to get me to buy his book (which definitely did not disappoint).

Other ones I subscribe to are the Microsoft Edge Dev Blog[2] , Mark Russinovich[3] and Games for Windows and the DirectX SDK[4]

And there's a few that have unfortunately not been updated for a long time, such as Larry Osterman[5], or have come to an end, such as Rico Mariani[6]

[1] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

[2] https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/

[3] https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/markrussinovich/

[4] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/chuckw/

[5] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/larryosterman/

[6] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ricom/

I'll have to second MS. I'll have to check out these individuals, but for sure some of the teams have been putting out really good reads. Recently with the chakra and DOM articles for edge, and I also enjoy the TypeScript and .Net blogs on a regular basis.
Shameless plug for my company's blog: levvel.io/blog

Lots of DevOps focus currently but also contains some stuff we're working on with machine learning, blockchain, and we are working on a much broader range of content.

Plus we'd love more feedback on the posts :)

(comment deleted)
My personal upvote for the Google Cloud Platform blog: https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/

...a pretty mixed bag with some product & PR posts inside, but the gems inside (especially SRE / CRE life lessons) are pretty awesome.

Also, we're getting started ourselves with some quality tech material - not too much there yet, but our Debugging Postgres post got a lot of love from the community: https://www.justwatch.com/blog/