Ask HN: What are some great engineering blogs?
Looking mostly for smaller startups and solo devs blogging insights from developing own products
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.
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/
RFC's an BCP's are worth following aswell. especially if one wants to know how systems in the default free zone are build.
>Julia's Drawings...Unfortunately it's not active anymore
As mentioned in that site, the newer ones can be found at https://wizardzines.com/comics/ and collections can be bought using links from https://wizardzines.com/
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
thanks for the list!
* [Joel on Software](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/) - engineering, leadership/startup, management, and recruiting.
* [Martin Kleppmann](https://martin.kleppmann.com/archive.html) - databases, distributed systems, and information security.
* [antirez](http://antirez.com/latest/0) - a blog by Salvatore Sanfilippo on engineering and open source projects.
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.
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:
Dan Lu [1] gives a lot of thorough walkthroughs on hardware, architecture & security, and occasionally on topics close to software development & developer psyché. His posts are a regular feature on HN. (I am surprised no one mentioned him).
The Factorio Friday Facts blog often contains some excellent deep dives into difficult problems solved during development.
One of my favorite posts is on an update to their pathing algorithm for biters: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-317
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
https://fabiensanglard.net/ does some great code reviews of old games
I really enjoyed https://overreacted.io
* [Daniel Lemire's Blog](https://lemire.me/blog/)
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.
Bunnie Huang's blog occasionally has its moments, here he is implementing a custom hardware accelerator for messaging encryption:
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!
It is less technical and more leadership, strategy and soft skill side of engineering but https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/ definitely deserves a mention.
Love to read this one: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/
Often time it presents great pieces of engineering work, with a "low-tech" approach that usually blows my mind !
Rands in Repose is great. https://randsinrepose.com/
+1 for Rands. Focus is less on day to day engineering and more on management, but it's fantastic for the latter.
His books are good too.
iism.org - https://iism.org
Why CEOs are failing software engineers and other creative teams
> Here is the rub: new value is a function of failure, not success, and much of software engineering is about discovering new value. So, in effect, nearly everything you are taught as a business major or leader is seemingly incompatible with software engineering.
https://iism.org/article/why-are-ceos-failing-software-engin...
+1, I actually started toying with blogging about dev management because of the excellent HN discussion on that article:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23872625
and this equally excellent discussion:
Developers can't fix bad management (2020)
https://jaycarlson.net/ - His two in-depth articles on embedded linux and the $1 MCU are both excellent.
* [Adam Johnson](https://adamj.eu/tech/) - Ansible, AWS, Django, and Python.
* [Julia Evans](https://jvns.ca/) - Linux, Rust, Debugging, Comics, HTTP.
and don't forget, also by Julia Evans:
* [Wizard Zines](https://wizardzines.com/)
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.
- [Drew Devault](https://drewdevault.com/)
- [Michael Stapelberg](https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/)
If you write a lot of performance critical software https://lemire.me/blog/ is must-read.
If you are into distributed systems then aphyr.com/jepsen.io are also must-read.
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.
I curate a bunch of them at https://www.discoverdev.io/ if you're interested.
Been running for a few years now! Probably have a few 1000 articles curated :)
I used to enjoy DiscoverDev and recommended it to everyone, but the RSS feed is never updated any more, so I thought it was stagnant.
I like my favorite here: https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/research/blogs#favorite-blog...
https://github.com/jkup/awesome-personal-blogs
Here's a list I stumbled upon some time ago.
This suggests a related question: What if Hacker News had its own "subreddits" dedicated to specific topics?
I've wondered if there'd be enough of a user base to have a few smaller subsets of the larger universe of submitted links. (It could be as simple as allowing links to be tagged -- maybe with sysadmin/programming/engineering "flair", to use Reddit's terminology -- and then having a way to re-focus the front page on just that subset of tagged links.)
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.
>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.
I feel I’ve confused a lot of people but really I mean “software engineering”.
Encourage your friends to blog and follow their blogs, it'll likely be more relevant to your interests :)
I quite like https://console.dev/latest/ It is curated list of tools mainly for software developers.
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.
Love mgmt's idea. Thanks for all the hard work of getting it started, good to see people starting to join you in development.
I maintain a github repo where I implement a feature identical polyglot persistent microservice in various programming languages and tech stacks then I put each implementation through the same load test lab where I collect then analyze the performance results and draw comparatives. I blog about my findings here.
John De Goes (https://degoes.net/)
The https://www.indiehackers.com/ forum probably has a lot of what you want, with small scale projects abound.
The riot games engineering blog is at a larger scale, but still awesome - https://technology.riotgames.com/
Is a pretty good read as well.
self promote XD not great, not even good
Some about "devops" stuff?