What are good solo developer blogs that you enjoy reading?

I follow regularly these people, these are mostly slow-going blogs or websites:

1. Fabrice Bellard: https://bellard.org/ This is not really a blog, but a traditional website with links to the work of its author (who is probably one of the top programmers ever). It updates rarely, but when it does, it is to expose yet another monumental piece of computing work that will blow your universe.

2. Linus Akesson: https://www.linusakesson.net/ He's always onto some funny crazy things: obfuscated programming, underhanded programming, c64 emulation, chiptunes...

3. Uriel l'Étranger: http://cat-v.org/ The only self-described "philosopher of software" that I have ever seen. His website is of course not updated anymore, but you can re-read it many times and always learn something new.

4. Ted Unangst: https://flak.tedunangst.com/ Nice to follow some cool news about openbsd development

5. Andy Chu: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/ Who has embarked in an amazing quest to turn the unix shell into a cleaner tool

6. Jens Gustedt: https://gustedt.wordpress.com/ If you really want to be up to date about the evolution of the C language

I love the blog posts of Julia Evans - https://jvns.ca/

they are quite informative and very enjoyable to read.

For low-level software, these are great:

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/

https://travisdowns.github.io/

https://preshing.com/

Whenever I evaluate a technology stack for microservice architecture viability, I implement the same feature identical polyglot persistent microservice then run it through the same load test as all the others. In that way, I can compare and contrast these various technology stacks. I blog about the results here.

http://glennengstrand.info

So far, I have covered clojure on ring, scala on finatra, java on dropwizard, javascript on node, python on flask, scala on scalatra, java on spring boot, go, and typescript on apollo (graphql).

Cliffski's blog is one of the only ones I follow that is still active. Not every post is on development progress, but enough that I find it worth following:

http://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/

A couple of recent posts I liked:

https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2019/12/16/stability-p...

https://www.positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2020/01/14/trying-to-a...

Here’s a curated list of engineering blogs, anchored to the individual category: https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs/blob/master/R...

Might be some names you recognise or want to explore.

I also wrote a basic script to rank domains by HN upvotes if you want to distill the list a bit more: https://github.com/RhettTrickett/hacker-news-rank

I used to read Joel's Joel on Software a lot. Also, Graham's . Another hidden jewel is the Elias Daler's blog.

Edit: I have to add Steve Corona's blog to the list. He's more on the motivation and guidance side. Everyone gonna hear and read stories about people getting straight out of their college with a six-figure job, working for SV startups. But the truth is, you're more likely to struggle, a lot, specially if you live outside of the developed world. Instead of success, Steve's story is of one who dropped out of the college at 19 and had to sleep in his car for while.

Joey Hess: http://joeyh.name/

Lives out in the sticks and codes embedded stuff in Haskell, usually to automate his life in the backwoods of East Tennessee.

I had a similar question the other day. I asked a few people and no one seemed to have a good collection to point to.

I specifically like reading posts by people who post regular retrospectives (weekly, monthly, or yearly).

So I started [0]. It only has three entries right now (including the one you mention above), but I would love to see contributions via pull requests.

[0] https://github.com/sixhobbits/technical-writing/blob/master/...

I really love Jesse Frazelle's[1] blog. She posts things about low-level (firmware/open-hardware/system) security. Her work is already well known here on HN[2].

A few more of my fav:

The grugq (NatSec, Tradecraft, OpSec): https://gru.gq/

Pinboard (aka Maciej Cegłowski): https://idlewords.com/

Adam Aelkus: https://aelkus.github.io/

Bert Hubert: https://berthub.eu/

____

[1] https://blog.jessfraz.com/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=jessfraz.com

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/

https://overreacted.io - Dan Abramov's blog

https://drewdevault.com

One of the sweetest Distributed Systems blogs I have ever read: http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com

And yes, also my favorite 101 explainer blog: https://arjunsreedharan.org

Not exactly a blog but as fresher I used to read https://www.perlmonks.org/

PerlMonks. The Original StackOverflow.

I still at times discover cool programming ways. Its a treasure mine.

https://vorpus.org/blog

I was particularly influenced by this post.

https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-g...

http://www.tinytouchtales.com covers both the process and the results, including the $ numbers. Great games too :)

https://bvckup2.com/wip covers mostly technical parts, but gives a good view into what's involved in making a software product from A to Z, especially in the parts further down the page.

Here is my list of solo developer blogs. Usually they are on topic. This does not include personal blogs I follow that happen to be developers.

@mdo (Bootstrop) - http://markdotto.com/

Keith Cirkel - https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/

Coding – Corbin's Treehouse - https://www.corbinstreehouse.com/blog

Aaditya Purani – Ethical Hacker - https://aadityapurani.com/

Ben Balter - http://ben.balter.com/

fulldecent - https://privacylog.blogspot.com

Orange - http://blog.orange.tw/

Cocoa with Love - http://www.cocoawithlove.com/

Mark Otto - http://markdotto.com/

Moxie Marlinspike's Blog - http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/

hueniverse - http://hueniverse.com/

I started posting weeknotes a few months ago and it's really helped me get back into the habit of posting at least once a week: https://simonwillison.net/

Weeknotes archive here: https://simonwillison.net/tags/weeknotes/

Brent Simmons has a good blog where he writes about the development about the RSS reader Netnewswire

https://inessential.com/

(Netnewswire itself is not a solo project though)

If you’re into Laravel and PHP, Freek is very open about all his code: https://freek.dev

I also blog about code and the financial side of running your own business: https://ma.ttias.be

Nicholas Frechette[0] has a deeply technical blog about building his MIT licensed animation compression library for game development...

[0] https://nfrechette.github.io/

This is a true solo developer:

http://pketh.org/archives/

It looks like this thread is turning into general blog recommendations. I like these, and they haven't been listed:

https://macwright.org/

https://tonsky.me/

https://nadiaeghbal.com/posts/

Small Cult Following, for Rust core language development: http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/ It's far from a solo project but he presents unique insights into the language. I personally really enjoyed his discussion of associated type constructors and high-kinded types, a series back in 2016(!), back when I started toying with Rust and somewhat frustrated by the lack of HKT.

I started a blog last year with the intent of sharing my journey to build an online game as a solo developer.

My activity dropped off but I’ve recently committed to push forward again so plan to get back to blogged several times a week.

I’m working on a post right now to talk about my experience of having my game reach #2 here at HN at what that was like. Should have it out tomorrow.

Anyway, you might find it interesting: https://blog.spacefrigates.com

https://akoutmos.com/

I started a blog the middle of last year and have written mostly about topics related to Elixir. But have also covered topics like RabbitMQ, Prometheus, Grafana, and PostGIS. I find my own blog very useful as I often reference the associated GitHub tutorial projects to remind myself how I did something :D.

Next week's post is about using Loki for structured logging!

https://wordsandbuttons.online

Awesome comment feed.

Specific to CSS, Chris Coyier's stuff is good https://css-tricks.com/author/chriscoyier/

Fairly sure he's solo enough and blogger enough to count.

Shameless self-plug: I blog about React, interaction/animation, and remote work. It's a bit of a pot pourri, but people seem to like it!

https://www.joshwcomeau.com/

1. Alex Pakhunov: https://blog.not-a-kernel-guy.com/

Alex Pakhunov (aka 'Not a kernel guy') is Sr. Software Engineer, Flight Software at SpaceX.

He born and graduated in Ukraine, but now is U.S. citizen.[0,1]

[0] https://twitter.com/alexeypa/status/958886120825081856

[1] https://blog.not-a-kernel-guy.com/about/

I'm trying to get a forum about MMO development started by posting to my own blog from here: http://reddit.com/r/mmodev

Solo developers are too busy with the business. I once started a series called "from 0 to 0.1: the journey from 0 to 1,000 customers. But I was too busy with other works like dev or marketing towards my target customers.

https://blog.seo-product-optimizer.com/index.php/2017/01/11/...

1. http://www.oilshell.org/blog/ 2. http://fragmentedpodcast.com/ 3. https://blog.stylingandroid.com/

I have more than 30 blogs on feedly.

btw, I blog on https://www.codevscolor.com

Here are some of the blogs I follow:

https://tjcx.me/ https://blog.vjeux.com/ https://zachholman.com/ https://rsms.me/

Oh good, more things to add to my rss reader :)

The Dolphin blog is good. https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/ It might have what you're looking for. Not single dev though, but very personal.

John Carmack on Twitter is good as well.

Here's my own: https://blog.winricklabs.com

Very good articles about Elixir and Erlang

https://www.theerlangelist.com/

I personally enjoy https://jalammar.github.io/ and https://mlexplained.com/- For machine learning & deep learning stuff

I've been building a Dashboard web app for almost one year now and I'm blogging [1] about it from the first day.

[1] https://dashboard.darekkay.com/docs/blog/

http://danluu.com is excellent.

I think what you are looking for is Indie Hackers: https://www.indiehackers.com/ They have a plethora of interviews with one-man projects you can learn from.

Here’s a good one: https://stevelosh.com/

And here’s mine: https://jezenthomas.com/

John Carmack tweets pretty regularly, often about projects. Right now he's taking a solo swing at AGI

https://mobile.twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack

https://kyletruong.com

I recently quit my job to become a solo dev and just started blogging about the process. If my content is of any value, please consider visiting.

I write about Swift and various development topics.

I’m getting ready to start a new series about Core Bluetooth.

https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany

Not solo but factorio: https://factorio.com/blog/ team has blog which is maintained every friday and very insightful

https://www.starterstory.com/ Its like Indie Hackers was back then. Before it changed ownership and became boring....

A good friend of mine is a very talented frontend engineer and has a very cool blog/website.

https://rafaelcamargo.com/stories

https://rubenerd.com/ is a dude from Australia who posts about BSD, anime and various tech-related stuff.

Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing:

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

I love reading these two for Python/Recommender Systems: 1. Ben Frederickson: https://www.benfrederickson.com/blog/ 2. Erik Bernhardsson: https://erikbern.com/

And for pure ML: 1. Ferenc Huszár: https://www.inference.vc/ 2. John Langford: https://hunch.net (although he hasn't written a technical post in a while)

As for developers building projects, you might like: https://www.derrickreimer.com/

I love Matthew Rocklin’s (the maintainer of Dask) blog https://matthewrocklin.com/

I blog about my learning journey here if you're interested: https://victorleungtw.com

AWS Lambda lead Articles about distributed systems and more

http://brooker.co.za/blog/

Nothing fancy but the content is really good. https://talktechnical.net/

https://www.indiehackers.com/

The founder also runs a podcast.

Designer/gamedev/makes interesting tools

https://xxiivv.com/

Hi,

I'm Boobo and I have a dev blog: https://boobo94.xyz

Hope you subscribe there.

Thanks

https://www.staticfire.site

if you are into obj-c/swift, there is a list of the most useful blogs here: https://apple-developer.org/resources/online-resources.html#...

Steve Yegge's old rants are good. I can never tell for sure which parts are him trolling me.

shameless self plug: https://victorzhou.com has a mix of machine learning, web development, and other topics. You may have seen some posts from there on HN in the past

the twitter of the maker of nomadlist , levels.io . He doesn't seem to have time to write blog posts, but he 's actively against the VC and publishes his company's financials 100% in the open

He gives real advice rather than wannabe advice

rusu.io tracks the challenges, lessons and successes in the development of a solo developer.

It won't overflow you with content that you cannot keep up with, but you'll get good insights into how a stoic approach to life and development works

https://tyler.io

If I'm allowed to self promote my own blog: https://opensourc.es Currently building a constraint solver from scratch and in a few days there will be a post about how to build an Enigma and how to crack it

Not always strictly dev related, but nice:

https://codinghorror.com

https://shkspr.mobi

Very nice post! A lot of awesome references here.

This thread os great

Google really kill personal site like these

Declan Hopkins: https://dooskington.com/

His latest Antorum game blogs have been real interesting

Here's mine: https://jacobobryant.com/

Can't vouch for if it's any good though ;)

Indiehackers.com has tons of these. Enjoy!

Looks like nobody has mentioned https://daringfireball.net/ yet.

For reverse engineering, Rolf rolles.

Personally i follow codeburst.io

Hacker News!

Dan LeMire

John Regehr

Here's a good one: https://susam.in/

Stumbled on this when his domain was hijacked accidentally due to an anti-botnet operation and his post about it came on HN (check the "Sinkholed" post). Since then I've subscribed to his blog, read the older posts and enjoyed the newer posts too.

He mostly posts about technology and mathematics. The reason why I got hooked to this blog is that they are mostly about offbeat topics that I wouldn't normally come across on my own. So there is something new to learn from every post. And they are very well written with great attention to detail.

https://lemire.me/blog/

www.yegor256.com

I am working towards a side-project but it's not live yet. I hope to launch it in the summer. I plan to document the process and release some posts about it "kalzumeus style" once I start it. My main blog right now is https://statagroup.com/