HN Explorer

Ask HN: Best Engineering Blog Posts?

198 points by themoops36 ↗ HN
Looking for examples of high-quality engineering blog posts, and particularly interested in posts from tech company blogs.

I'm looking to see quality writing in this genre- brief explanations of technical concepts, good structure and flow, and tying things back to business context.

49 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 98.6 ms ] thread
tmcz26
Joel On Software has great posts aimed at all levels: developers, PMs, non-tech managers and founders/CEOs. Begin with the Top 10 :)

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/

cebert
There’s a lot of great content on Joel’s site but he’s mostly stopped posting new content.
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anonn8675309
This is a shameless plug, but a friend and I have been writing a blog where we discuss a lot of engineering topics since around the start of the covid era.

Sample posts:

* Managing Engineering Managers: A Primer https://staysaasy.com/management/2021/10/14/Managing-Manager...

* A tech stack should be a well-balanced portfolio https://staysaasy.com/engineering/2020/05/30/Picking-Your-Te...

We also write about product, management, and company scaling in general, but we're engineers by trade and that's one of our go-to topics.

eatonphil
Noting that you asked for company blogs and not personal blogs: I think the most interesting ones are among startups since at larger scale there is still great technical content but it's more of just a random collection of great writing and no coherent story-telling tied to the company itself.

Like Microsoft has awesome random blogs all over the place (Raymond Chen for example). Etsy, Netflix both have good ones. They just don't tell any single story about the company any more.

So among smaller companies with strong technical+narrative writing I think of Tailscale, HoneyComb, Memfault, maybe Oxide Computer, maybe Trail of Bits.

travisd
Came here to suggest Tailscale as well.

For a taste, based on title alone: The Sisyphean Task Of DNS Client Config on Linux (https://tailscale.com/blog/sisyphean-dns-client-linux/)

manuel_w
Thank you so much for posting this. I never understood how domain name resolving really works in GNU/Linux. There are just too many moving parts. This article looks like it would sum everything up. Splendid!
vishnu_ks
A couple of my favorite technical blogs

- https://openai.com/blog/

- https://ai.googleblog.com

- http://antirez.com/

- https://research.facebook.com/blog/

- https://martin.kleppmann.com/archive.html

- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing

- https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/

- https://jvns.ca/

- https://www.johndcook.com/blog

- http://feross.org/

- https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/

- https://blog.andrewcantino.com/

- https://nickcraver.com/blog/

- https://blog.codinghorror.com

I have been also building an engineering blog aggregator called https://diff.blog to make it super easy to disover and follow blogs. Would love if you folks can give it a try :)

blntechie
Very nice aggregation blog. Is it possible to have a rss feed for your blog I can add to the readers?
vishnu_ks
There is no feed at the moment. It's on my to-do list.
princeali_
Really like the aggregator blog! It would be pretty handy to also have a newsletter that will go into my inbox and reading app (Matter is an amazing reading app btw if anyone is searching for one)
vishnu_ks
diff.blog does have a weekly digest that would be sent to your inbox :)
driscoll42
Why those blogs? Without any context it's hard to know why they're good.
turtleTome
Bookmarked diff blog and out it on my home screen. Thanks for this!
BillFranklin
I run Blogosphere (https://bilbof.com/blogosphere/) which aggregates blogs from independent engineers, and uses a recommendation system to find you new posts. This isn’t quite what you asked for as you wanted tech company blogs, but I often find independent engineers have really interesting, original, and more personal stories/style that you wouldn’t always get on corporate blogs.