HN Explorer

Ask HN: What programming blogs do you follow?

407 points by in9 ↗ HN
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/

83 comments

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naturalgradient
Ah rather thinly veiled blog advertisement?
[dead] pagnol
She also inserted some grammatical/spelling mistakes to make it look more authentic, real' smart.
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yitchelle
Does it matter if it generates interesting and compelling content/discussion as it had done?
Arcsech
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.

c0ffeekat
I follow Eevee on twitter, love their content, for some reason I always find it inspiring for my own projects
hprotagonist
- aphyr

- scott hansleman

- coding horror

- decyphering glyph

- eric lippert

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ryanschneider
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).

jvns
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 :)

rch
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.
Johnny_Brahms
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).
tomcam
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.
pmontra
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.
dangraziano
Yeah Cooper Press are fantastic, particuarly JavaScript Weekly, Ruby Weekly and React Status.
amelius
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 :)
humanrebar
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.

alkhatib
Have you tried Feedly?
humanrebar
Yeah, it didn't take for reasons I can't really recall offhand. Maybe I'll give it another shot.
BrandoElFollito
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

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

deepakkarki
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

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