Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily? - t3rcio
======
dustingetz
this stuff never seems to be highly upvoted on HN anymore, and if it gets to
+30 there's only a few comments, i speculate because new-school HNers don't
understand or care. so i track them myself.

best two advanced swegr blogs ever:

    
    
        http://prog21.dadgum.com/ -- swegr, fp theory
        http://www.johndcook.com/blog/ -- swegr, fp theory
    

other advanced swegr blogs. we're not talking atwood and joel, here, that
stuff is for college kids.

    
    
        http://blog.tmorris.net/ -- swegr, fp/tactics
        http://james-iry.blogspot.com/ -- fp/tactics
        http://playingwithpointers.com/ -- philosophy, fp/tactics
    

life

    
    
        http://www.jasonshen.com/ -- "Art of Ass Kicking" (life)
        http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/ -- "Strategy, Philosophy, Self-Discipline, Science. Victory." (life)
        http://dilbert.com/blog -- politics & life
    

fwiw, after having digested much of this material, I've moved on to reading
all the interesting whitepapers I can find, mostly via my social networks.
That's the really advanced stuff. I've been meaning to collect them and
summarize many to post to HN. nag me.

~~~
manveru
Sorry, but neither DDG nor Google know about the term "swegr", what does it
stand for?

~~~
jwallaceparker
To me a "swegr" sounds like it would mean "an outdoor event on a really hot
day where you have to dress in formal attire."

Cause you'd sweat a lot.

It probably stands for software engineering, though.

~~~
sambeau
In Glasgow, here in Scotland, a "Swedger" is boiled sweet or candy.

As in "gonnae gee-us wan o'yer swedgers, wee man".

------
lemming
The best blogs don't have daily content. In fact, the best blogs usually post
once a month, or less - often much less. Here are some:

<http://prog21.dadgum.com> <http://www.moserware.com>
<http://ridiculousfish.com/blog> <http://wingolog.org/>

------
naner
<http://stevehanov.ca/blog/> \-- Updates infrequently. Very good programming
articles.

<http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/> \-- Updates infrequently. Good articles on
Linux and Programming. Start here: <http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/best-of>

<http://catonmat.net> \-- He doesn't update much anymore since he's working on
his startup but the archives are still good. Mostly unix tools and CompSci
stuff IIRC.

<http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/> \-- Curates unix and plan9 articles and
some lower level/systems programming stuff with a few other peculiarities
sprinkled in.

<http://www.foldl.org/> \-- Curated programming/compsci stuff from certain
subreddits. Didn't last long, archives still have some gems.

<http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/> \-- I actually don't read the articles that
often anymore but I scan the titles as if it were a ticker of what's going on
in the programming world.

If someone could point me to more curated sources like foldl, I'd appreciate
it.

Non-programming:

<http://ryanholiday.net> \-- <http://www.ryanholiday.net/an-introduction-to-
me/>

<http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/> \-- I skip the pharma articles that are way
over my head. Cultural deconstructionism.

~~~
robyates
+1 for Steve Hanov's blog. I enjoyed his post about how programmers/HR review
your resume: <http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=56>

------
messel
Here are the ones in my reader, admittedly I haven't visited often enough over
the past couple of months:

<http://www.igvita.com/>

<http://ejohn.org/>

<http://codingrelic.geekhold.com/> (Denny covers assembly and networking
issues often in great detail)

<http://buhrmi.tumblr.com/>

<http://elegantcode.com/>

<http://72lions.com/>

<http://kellabyte.com/> (mobile-ish dev)

<http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/>

<http://ihumanable.com/blog>

<http://4loc.wordpress.com/>

<http://www.maxogden.com/>

<http://till.klampaeckel.de/blog/>

<http://www.quirkey.com/blog>

<http://www.mikealrogers.com/>

<http://cocoawithlove.com/>

------
duck
I use to have a very big list that I would consume via RSS. I kept making the
list smaller and smaller as I wasn't checking it very often and thought that
was the reason. Then I realized why: for the most part I was seeing the best
of those articles on HN. So now, for my daily reads, it is 100% HN + some
curated newsletters I'm subscribed too.

~~~
pestaa
Please share your preferred newsletters -- I can't seem to find the good ones.

~~~
duck
Peter Cooper has three of them that are hard to beat: <http://rubyweekly.com>,
<http://javascriptweekly.com>, and <http://html5weekly.com>.

I'll plug mine as well: Hacker Newsletter - <http://www.hackernewsletter.com>,
which is a product of what I said above. :)

~~~
pestaa
I sadly found Peter's newsletters to be quite noisy for my taste, but I signed
up for yours in a heartbeat. Thanks!

~~~
petercooper
Noisy? Too many items? They have been growing over the months, admittedly, but
there's a lot of noteworthy stuff happening :-)

~~~
pestaa
Thanks Peter for chiming in. I'm fine with missing a great chunk of noteworthy
stuff and rather read one focused source only. ;)

~~~
petercooper
This is where I'm trying to get some advice from you ;-)

Each newsletter is focused on a topic or natural collection of topics. What
source is _more_ focused on, say, Ruby than Ruby Weekly? I would find this
useful advice! :)

Or are you saying you'd rather see, say, 3 or 4 links a week related to a
topic.. and it's a problem with the volume rather than subject "focus"?

~~~
petercooper
pestaa got in touch with me directly and we had a productive discussion about
it. Just for anyone who was following :-)

------
Avenger42
Raymond Chen's blog, The Old New Thing
(<http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing>), is still my go-to site for any WinAPI
discussion - and he's got plenty to say on the subject of developer & user
behavior as well. Come for the brilliance, stay for the snark.

------
AbyCodes
There are similar questions in reddit faq:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/faq#Whatprogrammingblogs...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/faq#Whatprogrammingblogsorwebsitesdoyouread)

Steve Yegge's archives, <http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/> are in my
favourites, which are not mentioned here so far.

------
agumonkey
<http://dorophone.blogspot.com/> ;; elisp/picolisp stuff. monads, sexp, fexpr.
inspiring.

<http://okmij.org/ftp/> ;; general cs ftw. too deep.

<http://john.freml.in/> ;; nice http server perf in clisp.

<http://www.learningclojure.com/> ;; get the most of clojure in terms of cpu
cycles. refreshing.

<http://vanillajava.blogspot.com/> ;; perf, lo-level details about java.
refreshing.

btw, swegr ~= hacker ?

~~~
nolanw
> btw, swegr ~= hacker ?

I think it's an abbreviation of 'software engineer(ing)'.

------
ohyes
<http://planet.lisp.org/> Aggregates a bunch of common lisp blogs that are
generally interesting.

~~~
pjscott
On that note, I also read

<http://planet.haskell.org/>

Generally high quality, interesting stuff if you're into Haskell.

------
mrspandex
<http://www.thedailywtf.com/>

------
shangaslammi
The only semi-regularly updated ones I currently have in my RSS reader are:

\- James Hague's "Programming in the 21st Century":
<http://prog21.dadgum.com/>

\- Edward Z. Yang's blog: <http://blog.ezyang.com/>

Rest of my daily blog hits I get via Hacker News and reddit/r/haskell

~~~
dusklight
dadgum has been mentioned a few times in this thread .. could someone please
explain why that is a good blog, maybe a link to an article that is
insightful?

~~~
hernan7
Slow programming languages battle across time:
<http://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html>

A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering:
<http://prog21.dadgum.com/29.html>

------
taypo
More on the management side of development, but I like rands a lot
<http://www.randsinrepose.com/>

------
Pawka
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2075066/what-are-good-
php...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2075066/what-are-good-php-and-
mysql-type-blogs-to-read)

------
voidfiles
If you are looking for something that is more front-end specific Paul Irish
has put together a really great list of blogs, and made a google reader bundle
out of them.

[http://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user/1116587048495144532...](http://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user/11165870484951445324/bundle/frontend)

Some standout blogs that I always read about programming are:

<http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/> \- Was writing about JS before it was cool,
now it just has some of the most detailed coverage you can get of new things
happening in js.

<http://dailyjs.com/> \- a great daily roundup of the news in the JS community

<http://www.nczonline.net/> \- A developer who lead many FE efforts inside of
Yahoo, very outspoken about how JS should work.

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/> \- Joels essays can be a bit cantankerous,
but also paradigm changing.

<http://sheddingbikes.com/> \- pretty much everything that zed shaw does is
fucking awesome. Take it with a grain of salt though.

UPDATE:

Oh, I almost forgot steve yegge, <http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/> \- In a
few essays from steve my programming world opened into one of ideas, and not
just syntax.

------
yread
<http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/> C# designer

~~~
mullr
Seconded with enthusiasm. Eric writes at great length about the detailed
decisions that go into programming language design, especially revision of an
existing language. Even though I should know better, I have been guilty at
times of "how hard could it be" syndrome. Reading what Eric says has cured me
of that disease. (for programming languages at least)

~~~
hasslblad
I agree with this. At first glance the problems he presents are simple, then
you realise all the design decisions they've made and the pros and cons of
each approach they were aware of when writing C#.

On a footnote I also recommend Jon Skeet: Coding Blog -
<http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon_skeet/> He's known in the .Net community. He's
the guy behind Tony the Pony. He's a Google staffer who has written some C#
books. He goes into great depth about C# stuff.

------
_delirium
Far from daily, but Yosef K's blog is usually a good read when he does post:

<http://www.yosefk.com/blog/>

------
msbarnett
Mike Ash's Friday Q&A series is always a great investigation of the depths of
Objective-C and Cocoa: <http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/>

~~~
eelco
For iOS/Mac development, Ole Begemann's <http://oleb.net/> is invaluable,
especially for the monthly link roundups.

~~~
msbarnett
Awesome, I wasn't aware of that one.

Other good ones I know of are the already mentioned Cocoa with Love

<http://cocoawithlove.com/>

Cocoa is my girlfriend

<http://www.cimgf.com/>

and bbum's weblog-o-matic

<http://www.friday.com/bbum/>

------
icebraining
Daily, none, but I have some on my RSS reader; besides the ones already
posted:

<http://julien.danjou.info/blog/index.html> ← Julien Danjou, Awesome WM main
(only?) dev.

<http://ejohn.org/> ← John Resig, jQuery creator and lead dev

<http://codeutopia.net/blog/>

------
smoyer
Curious that I'm not following any of the blogs listed below ... I suspect
that there are so many that we could each read quality content and have very
little overlap. Of course, there are theory blogs that would apply to the
whole group, but many of the blogs are also language/domain specific and so
only a subset of us would be interested.

------
perlgeek

        http://planetsix.perl.org/ -- Perl 6
        http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org/ -- Perl 5

------
GlennS
I quite enjoy these: <http://ayende.com/blog> (.NET centric, writes
RavenDB/NHibernate Profiler) <http://blog.headius.com/> (JRuby creator)

------
Yhippa
I used to frequent Slashdot and DZone but all I have time for these days is
HN. This place is fairly good at promoting good stories and the comments are
usually as good as Slashdot so I feel like I don't need to go anywhere else
(for now).

------
quadhome
First, go through the archives of <http://anarchaia.org/> Then follow
<http://chneukirchen.org/trivium>

------
berkerpeksag
<http://neugierig.org/software/blog/>

<http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/>

------
instigateme
I try to read from FolkLore.ORg as often as I can - it's not a daily read and
there's not much new stuff, but it's off the beaten path and the old stories
of Bill and Steve and Woz are pure win.

------
Osiris
I read Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew, which is a .NET resource. He posts links
to tons of articles every morning on 10 different topics. It's fun to read up
on such a variety of different topics.

<http://www.alvinashcraft.com>

I also read the Daily WTF every day. It's great to have a chance to look at
crappy code and try to re-write it in your head on how it should have been
done.

<http://www.thedailywtf.com>

------
benbscholz
This summer I really enjoyed reading the joelonsoftware archives. The last
update was mid-September, but the previous posts kept me busy for quite some
time.

------
suyash
I only read HN for all the tech news/updates. I'm done with blogs now, it's
too much out there and I only want the best. HN does a good job with that.

------
MaxGfeller
<http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/> is also an interesting blog to read.

------
octopus
<http://altdevblogaday.com/>

This is a blog with multiple authors, so I check this once a day.

------
captaintk
I can highly recommend <http://blog.cdleary.com/>

------
Manuelito
This is my favorite:

<http://glowingpython.blogspot.com/>

------
kolsen
I like reading Scott Hanselman:

<http://www.hanselman.com/blog>

I also like this one with his series (back in 2008) on coding poker bots but
he hasn't posted in a while:

<http://www.codingthewheel.com/>

------
nickburlett
It's not specifically a programming blog, but I find "A List Apart"
(<http://www.alistapart.com/articles/>) to be a great resource for the design
side of creating software.

------
olalonde
This one should be quite popular among the HN crowd although it's not strictly
programming related.

<http://www.lesswrong.com> \- A community blog devoted to refining the art of
human rationality

------
sidwyn
Are my eyes playing tricks on me or is the title supposed to read 'What
programming blogs do you read daily?' instead of 'What programming blogs your
read daily?'

Both have subtle differences that poke at the perfectionist in me.

------
nxn
<http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/> Updates have gotten sort of rare
lately, but it is hands down my favorite JS blog.

------
steamer25
Not a blog per se but I do check it most weekdays:
<http://stackoverflow.com/?tab=week>

------
stevek
Entertaining rants, compression (data & image) & general sweng.

<http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/>

------
IGT
For a little bit on BIOS I go here: <http://sites.google.com/site/pinczakko/>

------
amitvjtimub
I created this app for visiting multiple sites you visit daily from one place:

<http://www.morningtabs.com/>

Give it a try.

~~~
_neil
background-size: cover;

~~~
amitvjtimub
Thanks

------
zackb
I've always liked Ryan Flynn's blog and link collection
<http://www.parseerror.com/>

------
allan_
<http://got-ravings.blogspot.com/> by the vim-nerdtree dude. very funny.

------
dmitrykoval
Artima developer, <http://www.artima.com/index.jsp> \- Java, Scala mostly

------
googletron
I tend to frequent <http://www.mahdiyusuf.com> The Dusty Programmer

------
BadassFractal
I'm curious, why is Coding Horror not in your lists? Is it too high level to
be considered a programming blog?

------
dlapiduz
For some Ruby/Rails stuff I follow:

rubyinside.com

yehudakatz.com

weblog.rubyonrails.org

------
phatboyslim
The Morning Brew <http://blog.cwa.me.uk/>

------
Omnipresent
<http://martinfowler.com/tags/>

------
sure051
BTW may i know what testing blogs do you read daily which would be more
informative?

------
larrydag
<http://www.r-bloggers.com/>

------
absconditus
<http://blog.plover.com/>

------
ochronus
<http://blog.mostof.it/>

------
r3570r3
"Joel on software" and "Coding horror" are my all time favorite.

------
friendlytuna
java.dzone.com css.dzone.com www.dzone.com/mz/devops www.dzone.com/mz/html5

All updated with new content almost every day, and the quality is getting
stronger.

------
swah
dekorte.com (rare post on programming, but its nice to see a language
implementor bashing on fp sometimes)

------
earl
Joe Damato has a great albeit infrequently updated programming blog,
<http://timetobleed.com/> . I think he wrote the memprof ruby gem. Posts HN
may really enjoy:

an obscure kernel feature to get more info about dying processes [1]

a presentation from some ruby conf, particularly slide set 2 which details how
memprof works and talks about the abi, etc [2]

plus a bunch of discussion of profiling tools to look at exactly what gcc or
your vm of choice are doing. Highly recommended.

[1] [http://timetobleed.com/an-obscure-kernel-feature-to-get-
more...](http://timetobleed.com/an-obscure-kernel-feature-to-get-more-info-
about-dying-processes/)

[2] <http://timetobleed.com/slides-from-mwrc-2010/>

------
afdssfda
None.

I read a number of blogs when I search, but there are none that I go to daily
just to read them.

------
cpfohl
news.ycombinator.com

------
rektide
Programming blogs post daily????

------
TechboyUK
It depends what posts appear in my RSS reader :-)

