Share your favorite software blog posts of 2023

Bicycle by Bartosz Ciechanowski: https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/ - HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35343495

Bartosz has many great blog posts, maybe most famously the one on mechanical watches published in 2022: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/

HN posts for Bartosz's blog: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ciechanow.ski

Technically not a blog, but the FIRESHIP youtube channel changed my life: https://www.youtube.com/@Fireship

A wild mix of super short videos about current software engineering topics, extremely well made, always on the edge of slapstick comedy, trashy memes, inside jokes, but still extremely densely packed with actual information. Plus, the nearly daily video series "the code report" is godlike: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyllRd2E6fg&list=PL0vfts4Vzf...

How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers: https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/how-instagram-scaled-to-14...

Where LLMs are headed: https://blog.quastor.org/p/language-models-future

SwiftUI at Airbnb: https://www.infoq.com/news/2023/10/airbnb-transitioning-swif...

GPU Computing Explained: https://codeconfessions.substack.com/p/gpu-computing

Building and operating S3: https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2023/07/building-and-op...

Meta’s new Serverless platform: https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/meta-xfaas-serverless-func...

Working With Discovery Trees: https://www.industriallogic.com/blog/discovery-trees/

Happened to see Paige Watson present about FaST Agile at the PhillyXP meetup group and then tried some of the concepts with my team at work to great success. We were looking for a good way to turn high-level product asks into actionable work and Discovery Trees fit the bill for us.

New amazing web security research by James Kettle:

Smashing the state machine: the true potential of web race conditions

https://portswigger.net/research/smashing-the-state-machine

The talk (on YouTube) is also absolutely brilliantly done.

James finds new vulnerabilities classes where others don’t even see potential for problems. Absolutely amazing!

This post on embeddings by simonw

https://simonwillison.net/2023/Oct/23/embeddings/

The Big TDD Misunderstanding https://linkedrecords.com/the-big-tdd-misunderstanding-8e22c...

The 'eu' in eucatastrophe – Why SciPy builds for Python 3.12 on Windows are a minor miracle

https://labs.quansight.org/blog/building-scipy-with-flang

I haven't found my favorite this year, but instead I was heavily into newsletters. Currently I'm subscribed to:

https://www.pragmaticengineer.com/ - industry insights.

https://www.workspaces.xyz/ - people sharing their home office setup incl. photos.

https://bigtechdigest.substack.com/ - all recent tech articles from companies engineering blogs.

https://leaddev.com/ - leadership stuff.

https://hackernewsletter.com/ - weekly hackernews summary nicely split into categories.

https://www.ben-evans.com/ - product and business around tech with nice deep dives.

I’m a fan of Terry Tao’s blog, which while not strictly software, is both good for advice and discusses one of my passions — formal verification.

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2023/12/05/a-slightly-longer-...

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/ask-yourself-du...

Both previously appeared on HN.

Another shameless plug. I'm pretty proud of my Learning Zig series (1). It's been translated into Chinese, Russian and Korean.

Some may know my other writings (e.g. Little Go/Redis/MongoDB Book). I don't feel like I captured Zig quite as well, but it's hopefully a useful resources especially if you're coming from a garbage collected language.

(1) https://www.openmymind.net/learning_zig/

https://samwho.dev/blog/

The visualizations help with the understanding while keeping it engaging too

Paul Graham's Essays keep me amused during this winter season - https://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html They go way back, and I do expect(and look forward to) new content.

Came across them via multiple sources, but what got me hooked was a reference from Robert Morris' work.

Kinda funny to reference this here :D.

Anything from Brandur is usually great - https://brandur.org/

Also, https://www.applied-cartography.com/ from Justin Duke

sharing some of my favorites

- https://nullprogram.com/blog/2023/04/29/

- https://slack.engineering/real-time-messaging/

- https://netflixtechblog.com/migrating-netflix-to-graphql-saf...

- https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2023/my-favorite-prime-number-...

Jake Lazaroff’s CRDT intro: https://jakelazaroff.com/words/an-interactive-intro-to-crdts...

https://danluu.com/ is my all time favourite. Unfortunately hasn’t posted in 2023, but I reread old posts often.

I enjoyed this post on pull/push based query engines - its examples were wonderfully simple.

https://justinjaffray.com/query-engines-push-vs.-pull/

I wrote a lot of articles on fundamentals (verifiable time estimation, leverage points with systems theory, using the Kelly criterion to shape project portfolio, system observability, evolution, etc.) with the intention of ending up on lists like these. None of them gained much traction, which means I need to get better at condensing the key points.

In the end, I think my most popular article of the year ended up being a relatively short note on how Bill Tindall approached software development for the moon landings: https://two-wrongs.com/tindall-on-software-delays.html

I was happy to get back into blogging in 2023 and write ‘A trip to the internet in 1996 with The Rough Guide 2.0’ -> https://www.planetjones.net/blog/10-06-2023/a-trip-to-the-in...

Not a blog post, but it could be one, this video about Github Actions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qljpi5jiMQ

We're Knot Friends

https://jeremykun.com/2023/04/01/were-knot-friends/

This is collection of all the blogs that I found insightful.

https://prashantbarahi.com.np/read-in-public

Here’s a shameless plug for my collection of short, succinct Django articles at https://photondesigner.com/articles

The latest article is: “The simplest way to build an instant messaging app with Django ” https://www.photondesigner.com/articles/instant-messenger

Shameless plug, as many others on this thread seem to have done. :) I wrote about the spectrum of macro systems available in different languages and why I think greater adoption for macros in development has been slow here: https://lambdaland.org/posts/2023-10-17_fearless_macros/

I learned a lot while writing it!

This post (The Techno-Optimist Manifesto), but in particular this section (that contains such gems as “Our enemy is anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness”): https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/#section--13

I've greatly enjoyed reading this Mainlining blog series from ichernev, about porting an Android phone to PostmarketOS:

https://mainlining.dev/

It teaches you how to probe the system, scrape out the proprietary microcode, and use it to build against a newer kernel (albeit with much tweaking)

This book review of Kieran Egan‘s Educated Mind: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-educat...

I haven’t thought much about education and school, but this got me interested.

Like some of the renegades in the comments, I'm tempted to share an entire blog. Instead I'll share some highlights from my favorite blog of 2023. It's not tech-focused per se, but rather politics/policy by a former "Last Week Tonight w/ John Oliver" writer and EPA speechwriter, Jeff Mauer. The blog is called "I Might Be Wrong". It's a perfect mix of smart and funny.

Here are some highlights from this past year:

"YIKES: Bing's Chatbot Made a Pass at Me After Only 90 Minutes of Relentless Prodding" https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/yikes-bings-chatbot-mad...

Six Products That Will Gently Defeat Your Baby. https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/six-products-that-will-...

AI Spells Doom for Incompetent Hacks. https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/ai-spells-doom-for-inco...

The "Rules" About Which Actors Can Play Who Never Made Sense. https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/the-rules-about-which-a...

Holy Moly Do We Ever Over-Value College https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/holy-moly-do-we-ever-ov...

Before You End Fencing Scholarships, Consider the Impact That Would Have on Major League Fencing https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/before-you-end-fencing-...

Why Is Homelessness a Municipal Issue? https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/why-is-homelessness-a-m...

EDIT: Just noticed the "software" qualifier in the OP. I almost deleted this comment, but it includes a few software-adjacent articles, on AI, so I'll leave it up.

It's more hardware than software, but "Infra-Red, In Situ (IRIS) Inspection of Silicon" by Bunnie Huang was interesting.

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=6712

Building a scalable Django WebSocket chat (messenger) app with Centrifugo https://centrifugal.dev/docs/tutorial/intro

A Casual Discussion on L4 Load Balancing - by @laixintao(in Chinese)

https://www.kawabangga.com/posts/5301

https://paulonteri.com/

bytebytego, really good content

For me, it was a post from Levels.fyi, inspiring story about simple and effective tech solutions.

"How Levels.fyi scaled to millions of users with Google Sheets as a backend"

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-...

https://justine.lol/

This is going to be a shameless plug of my own writing, not even technical but I needed to put it down in writing, so I did.

I found Timers to be a perfect tool to free up my brain and reminding me when I need to do something else. Making tea but I need to walk around, or do something else; timer on and I can get back to the right brew that I wanted. Browsing HackerNews but I need to get out after a specific time; timer on and I can get out.

Start a Zoom meeting but the attendant(s) are missing; timer on for 5 minute increment, then decide to ignore/cancel the meeting in either 5-min or 10-min.

https://brajeshwar.com/2023/timer/