HACKER Q&A
📣 ingvar77

What are some great engineering blogs?


Looking mostly for smaller startups and solo devs blogging insights from developing own products


  👤 msadowski Accepted Answer ✓
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.


👤 sibit
* [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.


👤 speps
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.

[1] https://prog21.dadgum.com/


👤 donquichotte
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:

http://sam.zeloof.xyz/


👤 srvmshr
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).

[1] https://danluu.com/


👤 cmalloc
The Factorio Friday Facts blog often contains some excellent deep dives into difficult problems solved during development.

https://factorio.com/blog/

One of my favorite posts is on an update to their pathing algorithm for biters: https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-317


👤 colinwilyb
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


👤 ChrisRR
https://fabiensanglard.net/ does some great code reviews of old games

👤 radiKal07
I really enjoyed https://overreacted.io

👤 simonz05
* [Daniel Lemire's Blog](https://lemire.me/blog/)

👤 brandrick
https://engineeringblogs.xyz — This is a decent resource pulling together over 500 sources.

👤 ximeng
Bunnie Huang's blog occasionally has its moments, here he is implementing a custom hardware accelerator for messaging encryption:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6140


👤 zonovar
https://randomascii.wordpress.com/ - Random ASCII – tech blog of Bruce Dawson (Google programmer working on Chrome, focusing on optimization and reliability)

👤 kamyarg
It is less technical and more leadership, strategy and soft skill side of engineering but https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/ definitely deserves a mention.

👤 abricq
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 !


👤 exaltation
Rands in Repose is great. https://randsinrepose.com/

👤 replyifuagree
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...


👤 phlipski
https://jaycarlson.net/ - His two in-depth articles on embedded linux and the $1 MCU are both excellent.

👤 jeroenjanssens
* [Adam Johnson](https://adamj.eu/tech/) - Ansible, AWS, Django, and Python.

* [Julia Evans](https://jvns.ca/) - Linux, Rust, Debugging, Comics, HTTP.


👤 mgbmtl
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.

https://everythingsysadmin.com/


👤 mendelmaleh
- [Drew Devault](https://drewdevault.com/)

- [Michael Stapelberg](https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/)


👤 jpgvm
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.


👤 gryzzly
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.

👤 deepakkarki
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 :)


👤 neillyons


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

Here's a list I stumbled upon some time ago.


👤 MilnerRoute
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.)


👤 Sosh101
I used to enjoy http://highscalability.com/ , but haven't read it in a while.

👤 tester34
>great engineering blogs

>smaller startups and solo devs blogging insights from developing own products

I feel like those are different things.


👤 softwaredoug
Encourage your friends to blog and follow their blogs, it'll likely be more relevant to your interests :)

👤 justshowpost
I quite like https://console.dev/latest/ It is curated list of tools mainly for software developers.

👤 alexellisuk
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.


👤 purpleidea

👤 gengstrand
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.

https://glennengstrand.info/blog/


👤 perceptronas
John De Goes (https://degoes.net/)

👤 cdiamand
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.


👤 kokizzu3
self promote XD not great, not even good

http://kokizzu.blogspot.com/


👤 el_padrinho
Some about "devops" stuff?