Ask HN: Best Engineering Blog Posts?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29758396

by themoops36 • 5 years ago

198 44 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

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.

tmcz26• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

There’s a lot of great content on Joel’s site but he’s mostly stopped posting new content.

qnk• 5 years ago

The Pragmatic Engineer is a very good blog/newsletter I've came across recently, highly recommended. https://www.pragmaticengineer.com/

anonn8675309• 5 years ago

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.

gravypod• 5 years ago

I find both https://nullprogram.com/ and https://christine.website/ to be very pleasant to read.

kcolford• 5 years ago

http://danluu.com

valdect2• 5 years ago

you can check https://refined.blog you can sort by category and hn upvotes.

valdect2• 5 years ago

this is the hn entry (Curated list of personal blogs) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27973836

eatonphil• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

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!

sadn1ck• 5 years ago

I loved reading these https://increment.com/

also massive collection of blogs https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs

vishnu_ks3• 5 years ago

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• 5 years ago

Very nice aggregation blog. Is it possible to have a rss feed for your blog I can add to the readers?

vishnu_ks3• 5 years ago

There is no feed at the moment. It's on my to-do list.

princeali_• 5 years ago

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_ks3• 5 years ago

diff.blog does have a weekly digest that would be sent to your inbox :)

driscoll42• 5 years ago

Why those blogs? Without any context it's hard to know why they're good.

turtleTome• 5 years ago

Bookmarked diff blog and out it on my home screen. Thanks for this!

itsdrewmiller• 5 years ago

Most of my favorite blog posts are from individuals rather than companies, but here are a few that are fully or basically from tech companies:

- https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha... (pretty long but very lucid)

- https://web.archive.org/web/20170612053125/https://blogs.dro... (can't find it on their blog anymore)

- https://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/05/03/stack-overflow-how-we... (personal blog but clearly about Stack Overflow)

serial_dev• 5 years ago

I love the Google Testing Blog https://testing.googleblog.com/

francoisdevlin• 5 years ago

Gotta give patio11 some love here...

https://www.kalzumeus.com/greatest-hits/

iamwpj• 5 years ago

Big fan of Cloudflare's posts: https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/engineering/

RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u• 5 years ago

Old New Thing[0] by Raymond Chen from Microsoft. Might be particularly interesting given the Exchange bug that happened today.

[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

BillFranklin• 5 years ago

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.

jpgvm• 5 years ago

Cloudflare etc that others have already posted are excellent by your definition. Uber blogs are surprisingly good. https://eng.uber.com/

Or more technical and less business goal focussed: https://jepsen.io/analyses https://lemire.me/blog/

kettunen• 5 years ago

Big fan of https://danluu.com. Also recently stumbled upon one of his posts that lists various different programming blogs worth a read: https://danluu.com/programming-blogs/. Found quite a few interesting blogs from there!

pvillano• 5 years ago

https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/

detailed blog of development of a Wii emulator

tyingq• 5 years ago

A few from things I've bookmarked:

https://netflixtechblog.com/predictive-cpu-isolation-of-cont...

https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/living-without-atomic-clo...

http://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/decisions.php

https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/intelligent-dns-based-lo...

https://medium.com/bumble-tech/api-for-qa-testing-features-w...

co001de• 5 years ago

Lots of good tech company engineering blogs:

https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer#company-...

aantix• 5 years ago

Hussein Nasser’s YouTube channel is amazing. He fills in all the gaps of knowledge for backend engineers.

https://youtube.com/c/HusseinNasser-software-engineering

daniel-thompson• 5 years ago

Some favorites:

- Bruce Dawson - Chrome engineer (https://randomascii.wordpress.com/)

- Matt Pharr - Graphics researcher (https://pharr.org/matt/blog/)

- Pete Shirley - Graphics researcher (http://psgraphics.blogspot.com/)

helloiloveyou• 5 years ago

Shameless plug, I've been trying to write interesting articles in my blog. Some of them made it to the frontpage of HN lately and I've gotten loads of nice comments:

+ https://www.mikealche.com/software-development/how-to-implem...

+ https://www.mikealche.com/product-development/an-underdog-gu...

epberry• 5 years ago

I work in the Database industry and have enjoyed these posts this year.

- https://arctype.com/blog/postgres-notify-for-real-time-dashb...

- https://heap.io/blog/speeding-up-postgresql-queries-with-par...

- https://blog.timescale.com/blog/how-postgresql-aggregation-w...

- https://blog.crunchydata.com/blog/understanding-postgres_fdw

manuko832• 5 years ago

I really like the way Mark Erikson writes his posts:

https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com

manuko832• 5 years ago

Just to give more context, he's a redux maintainer but he writes about several different subjects, Redux, React, Git, Applications in general, etc... He makes long and thorough posts, with lots of details and great analogies.

zerop• 5 years ago

List of Tech blogs rss feeds

https://github.com/msubhash/Tech-Blog-List/blob/master/READM...

darktest12• 5 years ago

Does anyone know good blogs for current CS students?

I don't want to create a similar thread and i ask here.

darktest12• 5 years ago

Does anyone know any good blog for current CS students? People who starting out.

I don't want to create another thread that's why i ask here.

defterGoose• 5 years ago

Not sure if it's what you're looking for, but:

https://woodgears.ca/

is woodworking from an engineering perspective.

w01fe• 5 years ago

We put a lot of work into this post to explain some of the deeper problems we are trying to address in our conversational AI framework:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/group/msai/articles...

tnawimaster• 5 years ago

https://ataspinar.com

iforgetlogins01• 5 years ago

70+ tech blogs I follow (together with a weekly aggregate): https://github.com/jakub-m/bulletin/blob/mainline/feeds.conf

jrmiii• 5 years ago

I really like https://engineeringblogs.xyz/ for following a bunch of these at once. They also publish the OPML feed if you're interested in aggregating them yourself.

Ask HN: Best Engineering Blog Posts?

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