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Ask HN: Great Blogs by Programmers
322 points by cdevroe on Feb 7, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 140 comments
I'm redoing my RSS feed subscriptions from scratch. I'd appreciate suggestions for great personal blogs by programmers.



Bruce Dawson: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/

+1 for Julia Evans already mentioned in another comment, who also has a favorite blogs post that may help you further: https://jvns.ca/blog/2016/04/09/some-of-my-favorite-blogs/

https://blogsurf.io/ has a huge directory, you could search by tags/topics and see if something interests you

Specifically for Python, I have a list of blogs here: https://learnbyexample.github.io/py_resources/miscellaneous....

Bartosz Ciechanowski: https://ciechanow.ski (more of a tech blog explaining things visually, interactively, etc)


solid list, thanks.


These are some I have in my Miniflux instance:

- Benjojo https://blog.benjojo.co.uk

- Julia Evans https://jvns.ca

- Tania Rascia https://www.taniarascia.com

- Fabien Sanglard https://fabiensanglard.net

- Jeff Geerling https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog

- Go360 https://www.go350.com

- Bartosz Ciechanowski https://ciechanow.ski

Also, shameless plug https://kinduff.com


just fyi there is an invalid cert warning on kinduff.com


grabbing all of these... tnx!


Fabien Sanglard's blog is one of my favorites. He posts mostly about internals and implementation details of classic video/computer games, plus other tech like Git and USB.

https://fabiensanglard.net

And if you find his blog to your liking, he has a couple of books doing a deeper dive into the internals of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.


His series of posts on Another World and its ports are a solid read.


You can buy some of his work in book form as well.


omg this is awesome, thanks!


https://github.com/search?q=list+of+awesome+blogs Look at the result of this github search for 'list of awesome blogs'. It's all there, in github...

For example these lists:

https://github.com/jkup/awesome-personal-blogs

https://github.com/markodenic/awesome-tech-blogs

https://github.com/crispgm/awesome-engineering-blogs


Wow, this will keep me busy. Thank you!


Xah has written a lot of great informative and opinion content on his blog. There is like a decade of posts covering a large span of topics like math, emacs, web dev, etc.

This is just one post I bookmarked, but you can link dive wikipedia-style.

http://xahlee.info/kbd/keyboard_hardware_and_key_choices.htm...


Wow! I have appropriated quite a bit of elisp snippets from them through the years, no idea they had a blog too. The emacs resources on that site are unparalled.


> math, emacs, web dev, etc.

And sex: http://xahlee.org/sex/all_things_sex.html

His Emacs-specific content is great, but the last thing I want to read are his creepy, gremlin-like takes on relationships and sex.


I'm not a fan of his Emacs stuff, even. A lot like Ken Rockwell, I've thought - opinionated to and often well beyond a fault, will reliably defend the most recent thought to cross his mind as if it were among the bedrock axioms of his life and soul, it's not that he can't say anything useful but you always want to get a range of other opinions first, and by the time you really know what you're doing you find yourself thinking he's mostly full of it.

At least Ken Rockwell can be relied upon as a quick source of high-res shots of new gear. I already know where to find the Emacs changelog, I'm not sure what purpose that leaves Xah Lee to serve.


Dan Luu: https://danluu.com/

I've found nearly every post clear and thought-provoking. Most have also generated good discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=danluu.com


He's Silicon Valley's gwern


Dan's writing is some of the best I've seen.


I find content written by Eli Bendersky pretty informative: https://eli.thegreenplace.net/


Julia Evans: https://jvns.ca/

Josh W Comeau: https://www.joshwcomeau.com/


Two of my favourites, great suggestions. I was going to suggest Comeau but OP didn't mention an area of interest, and Comeau is very front-end focused.


and Evans is system focused


As a non-systems engineer, I’ve found Julia’s blog immensely helpful. She does a great job of explaining a wide range of topics and also tackles soft skills very well


Thank you for these. I've been subscribed to Julia's blog for many years. Excellent resource.


No longer active but one of my favourites - https://prog21.dadgum.com/


https://danluu.com


Sadly now on hiatus, the morning paper by Adrian Colyer reviews research in modern systems, if you're interested in the boundaries of what's possible. Adrian climbed the ladder - big projects at IBM, lead AspectJ, CTO for Spring orgs, VC, and now... retired? https://blog.acolyer.org


Yes. This is an excellent blog. Even though it's stopped for now, the history is solid.


Surprised nobody mentioned Drew DeVault's blog (https://drewdevault.com). He's pretty well-known.


> He's pretty whiny.

FTFY


True, but some of his entries are interesting.


It's not regularly updated, but I absolutely love anything @munificentbob writes at https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/


you weren't the only one to suggest this, thanks


Scott Hanselman https://www.hanselman.com/blog/

Bruce Dawson https://randomascii.wordpress.com/


Here are some great but lesser known blogs:

- Brian Robert Callahan https://briancallahan.net/blog

- Austin Z. Henley https://austinhenley.com/blog.html

- Robert Nystrom http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com

- poor.dev https://poor.dev/blog

- Simon Willison’s Weblog https://simonwillison.net


Good list, thank you.


You're welcome.


Hussein Nasser

https://www.husseinnasser.com/search

His Youtube videos on backend engineering are fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_ML5xP23TOWKUcc-oAE_Eg


https://matt.might.net/articles/

Not strictly a software engineer, but a computer scientist (and so many other things), and an extremely smart person in general - worth reading even if you're not interested in academia.


pretty interesting topics I'd say


https://fasterthanli.me/


I'll add Raymond Chen's "The Old New Thing": https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ . Helped me change my views towards Windows (for the better) many years back and it's a good read anyway.

... and while here, I may also plug my own: https://jmmv.dev/


Unfortuntely it is no longer updating, but if you haven't read Kathy Sierra's blog this is a great time to go through the archives. It was not a programming blog but rather a blog about user experience, which I'd say is just as important.

https://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/


https://martinfowler.com/

https://joelonsoftware.com/

https://simpleprogrammer.com/ultimate-list-software-develope...


https://nullprogram.com/ is really good.


I've always found Mark Seemann's blog posts to be really pragmatic and insightful. He oftentimes puts to words things that I've always "felt" but hadn't quite found the thread to pull.

https://blog.ploeh.dk/archive/


In a similar world Scott Wlaschin: https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/


To everyone that submitted their recommendations, Thank you! I'm trying to reply to each submission since so many of these are so good, but I may not get to them all. I'm bookmarking this to refer back to for the next several months. I have already found so many great resources.


Shameless, but I'm a programmer and this is my blog: https://jlelse.blog/


Hey, here is mine: https://pilabor.com/

Is it even more shameless to abuse your shamelessness to promote it? ;)


Same boat, here's mine: https://geekmonkey.org/


I'm recently unsubscribed from your RSS feed because your "blog" reads more like a Twitter feed.


I'm ok with that, not everyone has to like my blogging style.


https://justine.lol/


A friend and I write about engineering management and product management. Generally shorter pieces with 1-2 core ideas https://staysaasy.com/

Examples:

Picking Your Tech Stack For Dummies (and the future): https://staysaasy.com/engineering/2020/05/30/Picking-Your-Te...

Complexity Debt: https://staysaasy.com/software/2022/01/17/complexity.html


https://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/

Blog of Dr. Christopher Rackauckas. The blog is a mixture of programming, Julialang, ML, computational scientific. I really enjoy


Jeff Atwood: https://blog.codinghorror.com/


The talented API developer Brandur Leach has his technical blog here: https://brandur.org/articles

Lots of articles on Go, Postgres and databases in general.


He also has an excellent newsletter! For example: https://brandur.org/nanoglyphs/029-path-of-madness


This is a long shot but hoping someone might be able to help... Almost a decade back I stumbled across an excellent blog which had extremely long and detailed in-depth articles related to performance. Every article had a "hare/rabbit" mascot section similar to the "cool bear" section from this blog https://fasterthanli.me/articles/why-is-my-rust-build-so-slo...

Does someone else remember that blog? If yes, please share the link!


- Daniel Lemire: https://lemire.me/blog/

- Andrew Lock: https://andrewlock.net/

- Steve Gordon: https://www.stevejgordon.co.uk/

- Scott Helme: https://scotthelme.co.uk/

- Phil Haack: http://haacked.com/


Patrick McKenzie (@patio11)'s https://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/


Pretty Rust-centric, but I think: https://matklad.github.io has some good content


OpenBSD developer Ted Unangst: https://flak.tedunangst.com/


Was going to post this one. He hasn't written anything lately, but was a regular read for me a few years ago.


https://lemire.me/blog/

https://earthly.dev/blog/authors/adam/ (Myself)


One interesting author from my RSS collection. I'm currently posting from my phone so I can't really create a curated list:

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/


EDIT:

Paste this hacky snippet into your browser's console to save all of the links into your clipboard:

  (() => {
    let result = [...document.querySelectorAll('td a')]
        .map((link) =>
            link &&
            !link.href.includes('ycombinator') &&
            !link.href.includes('javascript:void')
                ? link.href
                : ''
        )
        .filter(Boolean);
    result = [...new Set(result)];
    result.sort();
    copy(result.join('\n\n'));
  })();
Just to help, here's a compiled-list of all of the links shared here so far:

http://ayende.com/blog

http://blog.cleancoder.com/

http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/

http://www.stargrave.org/LinksCatPersonal.html

http://xahlee.info/kbd/keyboard_hardware_and_key_choices.htm...

https://0xd34df00d.me/

https://2ality.com/

https://andymatuschak.org/

https://austinhenley.com/blog.html

https://bas.codes/

https://bas.codes/posts/python-slicing

https://bernsteinbear.com/pl-resources/

https://blog.aawadia.dev/

https://blog.acolyer.org/

https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/

https://blog.codinghorror.com/

https://blog.esteetey.dev/

https://blog.johnnyreilly.com/

https://blog.kwatafana.org/

https://blog.ploeh.dk/archive/

https://bloggingfordevs.com/trends/

https://blogsurf.io/

https://bowtiedfox.substack.com/

https://brandur.org/articles

https://briancallahan.net/blog

https://brooker.co.za/blog/

https://ciechanow.ski/

https://collection.mataroa.blog/

https://danluu.com/

https://drewdevault.com/

https://dsebastien.net/

https://dusted.codes/

https://earthly.dev/blog/authors/adam/

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/

https://fabiensanglard.net/

https://fasterthanli.me/

https://flak.tedunangst.com/

https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/

https://github.com/crispgm/awesome-engineering-blogs

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

https://github.com/jkup/awesome-personal-blogs

https://github.com/markodenic/awesome-tech-blogs

https://github.com/search?q=list+of+awesome+blogs

https://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Ask%20HN%3A%20Great%20Blogs%20...

https://joelonsoftware.com/

https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/

https://jrsinclair.com/

https://justine.lol/

https://jvns.ca/

https://jvns.ca/blog/2016/04/09/some-of-my-favorite-blogs/

https://jwstanly.com/blog/

https://kerkour.com/

https://kinduff.com/

https://learnbyexample.github.io/py_resources/miscellaneous....

https://lemire.me/blog/

https://lmy.medium.com/

https://martinfowler.com/

https://matklad.github.io/

https://matt.might.net/articles/

https://michelenasti.com/

https://modfoss.com/

https://nickp.svbtle.com/

https://noobmaker.substack.com/

https://nullprogram.com/

https://paulmck.livejournal.com/

https://poor.dev/blog

https://prog21.dadgum.com/

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/

https://simonwillison.net/

https://simpleprogrammer.com/ultimate-list-software-develope...

https://staysaasy.com/

https://staysaasy.com/engineering/2020/05/30/Picking-Your-Te...

https://staysaasy.com/software/2022/01/17/complexity.html

https://tenthousandmeters.com/

https://unixsheikh.com/

https://vadimkravcenko.com/

https://www.buildthestage.com/

https://www.codingshorts.io/

https://www.davidvlijmincx.com/

https://www.fluentcpp.com/

https://www.go350.com/

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/

https://www.husseinnasser.com/search

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog

https://www.joshwcomeau.com/

https://www.kalzumeus.com/archive/

https://www.stochasticlifestyle.com/

https://www.swyx.io/rss

https://www.taniarascia.com/

https://www.theerlangelist.com/

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_ML5xP23TOWKUcc-oAE_Eg

https://www.yusufaytas.com/

https://www.zhenghao.io/


applause


Me, myself: https://www.zhenghao.io/ Check it out if you are interested in JavaScript, TypeScript, or web development in general


Love your writing and thought process


I maintain this list. It contains non-programmer blogs as well but the vast majority is software people:

https://collection.mataroa.blog/


Wow! Ty.


The Universe of Discourse by Mark Dominus: https://blog.plover.com

Kartik Agaram: http://akkartik.name

compudanzas: https://compudanzas.net/

Pete Elmore: http://debu.gs

Joey Hess: http://joeyh.name


In this blog https://glennengstrand.info/blog/ I implement feature identical rudimentary polyglot persistent news feed microservices in various programming languages and tech stacks then compare them with previous implementations in terms of architecture, design, coding, and performance under load. I currently have 13 implementations of that same back end service in a freely available public github repo.


I quite like Moments in graphics by Christoph Peters - http://momentsingraphics.de/


If you're interested in Erlang/Elixir, https://www.theerlangelist.com/


Some of my favorites more Frontend leaning:

- https://www.joshwcomeau.com/

- https://jhey.dev/writing/

- https://varun.ca/writing

- https://ishadeed.com/articles/


I'm not sure it qualifies as "great", but I am a programmer!

https://xavd.id/blog

I write about all sorts of things, some of which are technical. Here's a favorite Python article: https://xavd.id/blog/post/python-dataclasses-from-scratch/


https://iximiuz.com - Ivan Velichko - blog that explains Kubernetes, Docker, Linux, etc visually


Paul E. McKenney's Journal: https://paulmck.livejournal.com/


This looks like I'll be spending some time catching up. Thanks!


https://unixsheikh.com/. however it may read, it is helpful.


https://2ality.com/ (by Dr. Axel Rauschmayer, amazing JS blog)


This looks good and in-depth. I like it. Thank you.


https://bloggingfordevs.com/trends/


The ryg blog: https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/


If you're into C++, check out: https://www.fluentcpp.com/

It's a solid resource if you consider yourself a programming athlete.

I won't shamelessly plug mine, as it doesn't fit this category yet (programming posts are the least ones I have by quantity), but looking forward to improve that.


i write at swyx.io/ideas (RSS https://www.swyx.io/rss), on javascript, devrel, and tech strategy!

i guess best track record is HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=swyx.io


I've really enjoyed:

https://death.andgravity.com/


Is John Carmack still maintaining his .plan? I haven't checked in years but there's no harm in trying to finger him.


old school


http://blog.cleancoder.com/


If you're interested in frontend development (web, react native), UXUI and open source libraries, check out my blog. Just published an article on creating a CSS playground with vanilla JS.

https://blog.esteetey.dev/


Shameless plug for my blog: https://www.buildthestage.com

I write about technical leadership and engineering management. The target audience are technical leads, managers, and people who wish to become leaders one day.


Shameless plug: https://blog.johnnyreilly.com

I generally write about tech I'm using; a lot of TypeScript, a lot of Bicep, a lot of Azure at the moment. Essentially anything that intrigues me may get blogged


https://andymatuschak.org


I am digging this one. Thank you for sharing.


If you like programming languages content, I link to a lot of excellent papers and blogs from https://bernsteinbear.com/pl-resources/


If you're interested in building distributed systems, then I thoroughly recommend Marc Brooker's blog: https://brooker.co.za/blog/


There is my collection of hundreds of personal and IT-related blogs/homepages: http://www.stargrave.org/LinksCatPersonal.html


Shameless plug of my blog. It’s about new and upcoming features in Java and unit testing. https://www.davidvlijmincx.com/


I mean, shameless plug, but you can read some of my stuff, I don't mind: https://vadimkravcenko.com

I mostly write about scaling early stage startups


No one ask a question about bad blogs for programmers, so I'd like to self promote my personal blog https://whyboobo.com/.


;)


https://maskray.me/blog/ has plenty of solid information on the LLVM and GCC/Binutils toolchains.


Malte Skarupke: www.probablydance.com

Also: apenwarr.ca

Shameless plug for my own blog: www.specbranch.com


https://modfoss.com/ - a blog by me, a person and a programmer! I don't know about great, but I try :)


https://lethain.com/ - not strictly programming, but more of tech career and management-related.


Shameless plug on my blog on solving and visualizing problems: https://nickp.svbtle.com/


https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/ is one of my faves although not super frequent.


https://jrsinclair.com/ has amazing JS & functional programming essays.


https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/ (Jamie Brandon)


I got my list here https://bobbydreamer.com/irevere


All time classic: Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood (SO)

Shameless plug: https://dsebastien.net


https://amortizedcost.net – bite size posts about programming


Shameless plug: https://bas.codes

I just started to share my knowledge I have as a developer and trainer, so there is not much to see here, yet. I think the best article so far has been the one about slicing (it got a huge traffic spike from reddit): https://bas.codes/posts/python-slicing

I would love to hear feedback to improve my writing.


Always good to see a .codes blog! Mine is qubyte.codes.


Shameless plug: https://kerkour.com

Rust, Go, Security & Cryptography :)


https://noobmaker.substack.com/


https://jwstanly.com/blog/


https://tenthousandmeters.com/


Also, you can checkout https://refined.blog


Me, myself and I: https://michelenasti.com


https://www.codingshorts.io/


https://blog.kwatafana.org/


https://bowtiedfox.substack.com


https://blog.aawadia.dev/


I enjoyed recently:

- https://jacobian.org/


0xd34df00d - https://0xd34df00d.me


http://ayende.com/blog


https://www.yusufaytas.com


I don't know. But I do know that I just added your RSS feed to my self-built reader. ;)


Been enjoying The Mad Ned Memo from Ned Utzig lately


self plug, using Chinese: https://www.sulinehk.com/


self plug:

https://dusted.codes


Shameless plug of mine: https://lmy.medium.com

I've moved everything out of the paywall yesterday.

I write about tech & economics, productivity & best practices, time & knowledge management, interesting analogies, and occasionally about the comedy club I help organize.


self plug jameshylands.co.uk


softacos.substack.com


https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com




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