What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?

> especially from tech company blogs,

https://engineering.fb.com/

https://netflixtechblog.com/

https://stripe.com/blog/engineering

https://eng.uber.com

https://engineering.linkedin.com/

https://engineering.atspotify.com/

https://tailscale.com/blog

https://careersatdoordash.com/engineering-blog/

https://dropbox.tech/

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Aggregators:( https://engineering.fyi/ ; https://diff.blog/ )

+ https://hn.algolia.com/?query=engineering%20blog

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create a public engineering-blog SKILL.md. ( ~ collect the writing patterns that work on HN )

Francesco Mazzoli’s blog on https://mazzo.li/archive.html. His blog has topped HN a few times with various low-level/linux topics, some deep dives into algorithms etc.

Encountered one specific example about a month ago here on HackerNews - All about automotive lidar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110395

Blog posts where I find quality really shows are usually about something I know next to nothing about how it works. A badly written article usually either goes really shallow or skips some facts when going into depth and requires catchup elsewhere to actually understand it. The lidar article from Main Street Autonomy goes beyond basics and explained everything from the ground up in such a connected way that it was a real pleasure reading it.

Sounds like you look for an intersection of academic papers (1.), tech blogs (2.), text books (3.), and confidential business strategies (4.)? A very high ambition.

https://technology.riotgames.com/ https://fabiensanglard.net/

You might be more interested in books than a blog.

For example: The Architecture of Open Source Applications

https://aosabook.org/en/index.html

It’s not a traditional blog, but Oxide’s RFDs cover exactly what you asked — implementation details and trade-offs: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/

Armin Ronacher's blog (of flask/jinja fame) https://lucumr.pocoo.org/

Antirez' blog (of Redis fame) https://antirez.com/

Simon Willison's blog (about AI) https://simonwillison.net/

TigerBeetle: https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/

- https://modal.com/blog/vprox - https://modal.com/blog/host-overhead-inference-efficiency - https://modal.com/blog/resource-solver

Allegro Tech Blog: https://blog.allegro.tech/

You're probably looking for something that is more focused on specific software decisions/implementations, but https://infrequently.org is the best web development blog out there.

It's not "technical" so much as it just educates you on how to be a good web developer/run a team. There's zero fluff and considerable detail (footnotes are practically blog posts themselves).

Maybe

https://projectzero.google/archive.html

https://netflixtechblog.medium.com/

https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/engineering/

https://discord.com/blog https://blog.cloudflare.com/ https://netflixtechblog.com/

I'm a huge fan of https://eblog.fly.dev/index.html. The author, Efron, very graciously advises me on a lot of little things around my engineering practice, and I've learned a huge amount about weird holes in my practice from industry dysfunction in a very short period of time from him.

Tweag has many interesting entries with good technical depth:

https://www.tweag.io/blog

http://highscalability.squarespace.com/all-time-favorites/

https://dora.dev/research/2025/dora-report/

There are no such blogs. Usually companies, or individuals, will write these after they implement some feature into their products. Which makes them inherently little pieces of information scattered all over the internet and there is no one blog that is just about this.

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/

not software engineering, but https://practical.engineering/

For deeper understanding of seL4's developments and the historical context in which it appeared, Gernot Heiser's blog[0].

0. https://microkerneldude.org/

Cloudflare, google project zero.

https://youtube.com/@modernsoftwareengineeringyt

Ask the LLM you wrote this post with!

oldnewthing

These should be read at least once in your life if interested in building industrial grade electrical, mechanical, and or software.

1. https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/

2. https://standards.nasa.gov/standard/NASA/NASA-STD-87394

3. https://standards.nasa.gov/NASA-Technical-Standards

4. https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/workmanship

5. https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...

7. https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/laboratory-metrology/metrology-...

8. https://www.mitutoyo.com/training-education/

9. "Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm )

The artifacts are usually beautiful from good Workmanship Standards, Design For Manufacturability, and systematic Metrology. Dragging us all into the future one project at a time.

Note that training an ML model with such data would be pointless, as statistical saliency forms a paradox with consumer product design compromises. Note, there are _always_ tradeoffs in every problem domain.

'What it actually means to be "AI Generated"' ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERiXDhLHxmo )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXbzktx1KfU

Have a nice day, and note >52% of the web is LLM slop now. YMMV =3

Maybe it's just because I'm LLMing a bit too much, recently, but this question sounds to me like a prompt.

https://www.makingsoftware.com/

https://clickhouse.com/blog?category=engineering

Seems to me you're describing books.

https://jvns.ca/ Not a tech. company blog. Explains technical concepts clearly and top notch technical posts. Fits 1,2, 3 criteria of what you ask, though not the 4th one.

This post by Jay Kreps that introduced Kafka to the works remains one of my favorite pieces of engineering blog content of all time: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha...

Not a blog, but books detailing real-world experiences from Indian Engineers/Scientists/Researchers; Quite inspiring to see how people strive unceasingly towards a goal in spite of all the limitations and hurdles (viz. Political/Financial/Material etc.) imposed on them.

There is much to learn, in these books.

The Mind of an Engineer by Purnendu Ghosh et al. - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-10-0119-2

The Mind of an Engineer: Volume 2 by Purnendu Ghosh et al. - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-15-1330-5

https://samwho.dev has some fantastic blog posts with great visualisations

A lot of great links here to the firehose (or at least for working parents). Unless someone has built it - anything that aggregates and shows beyond the first click of the by-line. (i.e. a first paragraph, or LLM-summary of the content)?

Otherwise... coming soon from a vibe-coding session near you...

It's so interesting to me as a Mechanical Engineer and Hardware designer/architect how on HN "Engineering" almost always means "Software engineering" here.

I always enjoyed Jason Sachs' blog at embedded related.

https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/152.php

https://randomascii.wordpress.com/ - former Chrome engineer about all things performance engineering and particularly focused on Windows.

Often enjoyed article by chris wellons https://nullprogram.com/

quite diverse, often challenging, sometimes mind bending

I feel obligated to mention LWN - https://lwn.net/ - since that is exactly what we aspire to.

To balance all of the computer engineering blogs, check out this mechanical engineering channel: https://youtu.be/8yUsDnBXo_g?si=CXzWV9D5OvHcCBm3

MongoDB Engineering Blog is shaping up well

https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/channel/engineering-blo...

Not corporate, but two of the best individual developer blogs are Eli Bendersky's and Rachel by the Bay. They've both been blogging prolifically for a decade+, Eli with a focus on, broadly, compilers and Rachel on SRE/debugging.

Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing is also required reading for anyone that works with Windows.

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/

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

While not exactly a blog, I've collected ~16 years of [startup] engineering lessons into a book and I think it came out fantastic. People are saying super nice things.

https://scalingfastbook.com

> https://lessnews.dev

A while ago I felt this "information fatigue" due to the overwhelming updates from the typical news sources (reddit, twitter, even hn).

So I built a _slow_ webdev newsfeed aggregator that doesn't overwhelm you of constant updates, so you focus on reading the actual blog contents and enjoy other things.

https://engineeringblogs.xyz/ is a good place listing more than 500 (and adding more) engineering blogs.

I maintain list of blogs together with "RSS reader" for personal purposes, but it's publicly available here:

https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/#blogs-general

https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/news/

I'm grouping most of the suggestions here into my feed summarizer at https://feeds.carmo.io - there will be an "Engineering" bulletin there soon.

The book Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann covers exactly the topics you are asking about and references many blog posts.

https://brandur.org/

Hey! Check out https://devblogs.sh. It's a curated library with tech blog from companies, as well as individuals and conferences. Every blog is hand picked. There is also AI agent which you can use for quick search.

For data engineering the two best by far I know of:

1. BI Cortex - sadly seemingly not active anymore: https://bicortex.com/

2. Mark Litwintschik's Tech Blog: https://tech.marksblogg.com/