Ask HN: What are some great engineering blogs?

281 points by ingvar77 ↗ HN
Looking mostly for smaller startups and solo devs blogging insights from developing own products

63 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 131 ms ] thread
Here are some that I've been following why working on my newsletter (https://weeklyrobotics.com/). These will be mostly robotics oriented, and some of them might be inactive:

* [Robots&Chisel](http://www.robotandchisel.com/blog/) - a blog by Michael Ferguson, he did a very nice series of posts on restoring a UBR-1 robot and implementing ROS-2 on it

* [Mike Isted](https://mikeisted.wordpress.com/) - at one point Mike was writing quite many blog posts on making drones, including some offboard control and autonomy

* [The Interrupt](https://interrupt.memfault.com/) - in-depth blog about embedded programming. Really like their monthly "What we've been reading..." series

* [Electron Dust](https://www.electrondust.com/) - inactive, but a really cool series of blog post on making a ball bouncing robot

* [Casey Handmer blog](https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/) - some very in-depth articles related to space

* [Modicum of Fun](https://jpieper.com/) - a blog post of Josh Pieper, who makes mjbots open-source motor controller

Other:

* [Julia's Drawings](https://drawings.jvns.ca/) - neat presentation of various technical concepts in programming. Unfortunately it's not active anymore.

thanks for the list!
As for corp blogs: Engineers at Facebook [0], LinkedIn [1], Fly [2], and Cloudflare [3] have penned some incredible posts over the years.

Also: IETF RFCs and research papers (esp, from Microsoft and Google) remain an under-appreciated body of work on how real-world systems are built.

[0] https://engineering.fb.com/

[1] https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog

[2] https://fly.io/blog/

[3] https://blog.cloudflare.com/

RFC's an BCP's are worth following aswell. especially if one wants to know how systems in the default free zone are build.
(comment deleted)
Any great robotics blogs for a younger audience?
I don’t have any in my RSS feed, but if you were to search for them I would try finding some describing iRobot Root or Mindstorm projects.

If videos could do then perhaps the Brick Experiments Channel could have something interesting: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MwHHErfX9hI

The canonical blog is Joel on Software/Fogcreek Software.

Patio11 has several good HN posts.

You can use showdead on and read my HN posts about databases, which apply to both startups and FAANG companies.

>great engineering blogs

>smaller startups and solo devs blogging insights from developing own products

I feel like those are different things.

I don't know, it can definitely be done-I'm doing it for my personal stuff[0] it just takes explicit effort to write about what you are actually doing.

Unless you're suggesting only large startups / teams can create great engineering work, which, like, I don't really agree with at all.

[0] https://devlog.hexops.com

I feel I’ve confused a lot of people but really I mean “software engineering”.
I always go back to James Hague's blog posts in "Programming for the 21st century" [1]. It inspired me so much as I was going through my early career in game dev. He's retired the blog now, but it's still very relevant.

[1] https://prog21.dadgum.com/

I used to enjoy http://highscalability.com/ , but haven't read it in a while.
I used to enjoy this but came back to it recently and sadly seems chock full of promotional content with interesting stuff much harder to find.
Yeah I had the same impression from a brief look.
https://engineeringblogs.xyz — This is a decent resource pulling together over 500 sources.
I also really appreciate the curation and simplicity of this site - it's my go to resource.

If anyone's interested, they provide the full OPML as well.

The Prepared is weekly newsletter which has had some great engineering content. Last week there was an interview about the trials of making a folding bicycle wheel.

I've been a follower for a long time but haven't been able to allocate funds for their paid Slack channel.

Site: https://theprepared.org

I feel like engineering is used in the very broad sense, but books/blogs by Tom Limoncelli (et al) helped me a lot in the past in better planning and structuring the systems I worked with.

https://everythingsysadmin.com/

http://jacobian.org is an excellent blog from one of the creators of Django framework – lots of good writing about engineering management, general team work and software development etc.
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/ - Random ASCII – tech blog of Bruce Dawson (Google programmer working on Chrome, focusing on optimization and reliability)
I came here to post the same link. I'm always fascinated about his ETW traces blog posts on how to discover performance bottlenecks. Great guy!
Sam Zeloof is building ICs in his garage. His blog and youtube channel are excellent and he has now a quite sophisticated process that produces reliable results, quite astounding really:

http://sam.zeloof.xyz/

If you're after software engineering and not structural, then I have a fair amount of blog posts on Go, Kubernetes, Docker and OSS software - https://blog.alexellis.io/

You'll also find insights from building my own products and revenue in my weekly sponsors emails -> https://insiders.alexellis.io/ - I often post book reviews and learnings, like last week on copywriting and tangible vs intangible benefits.

Encourage your friends to blog and follow their blogs, it'll likely be more relevant to your interests :)