from Hacker News

Ask HN: What are some great engineering blogs?

by ingvar77 on 11/16/21, 5:44 AM with 56 comments

• by msadowski on 11/16/21, 7:40 AM

  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.

• by sibit on 11/16/21, 11:59 AM

  * [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.

• by speps on 11/16/21, 9:39 AM

  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/

• by donquichotte on 11/16/21, 12:58 PM

  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/

• by srvmshr on 11/16/21, 3:05 PM

  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/

• by cmalloc on 11/16/21, 7:51 AM

  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

• by colinwilyb on 11/16/21, 12:03 PM

  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

• by ChrisRR on 11/16/21, 10:39 AM

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

• by radiKal07 on 11/16/21, 9:01 AM

  I really enjoyed https://overreacted.io

• by simonz05 on 11/16/21, 1:50 PM

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

• by brandrick on 11/16/21, 10:25 AM

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

• by ximeng on 11/16/21, 10:36 AM

  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

• by zonovar on 11/16/21, 12:35 PM

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

• by kamyarg on 11/16/21, 12:30 PM

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

• by abricq on 11/16/21, 9:13 AM

  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 !

• by exaltation on 11/16/21, 12:05 PM

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

• by replyifuagree on 11/16/21, 5:03 PM

  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...

• by phlipski on 11/16/21, 5:31 PM

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

• by jeroenjanssens on 11/16/21, 1:44 PM

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

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

• by mgbmtl on 11/16/21, 12:22 PM

  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/

• by mendelmaleh on 11/16/21, 2:14 PM

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

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

• by jpgvm on 11/16/21, 5:04 PM

  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.

• by gryzzly on 11/16/21, 12:32 PM

  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.

• by deepakkarki on 11/16/21, 3:58 PM

  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 :)

• by neillyons on 11/16/21, 2:30 PM

  https://eater.net

• by nikivi on 11/16/21, 10:49 AM

  I like my favorite here: https://wiki.nikitavoloboev.xyz/research/blogs#favorite-blog...

• by hoseja on 11/16/21, 9:25 AM

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

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

• by MilnerRoute on 11/16/21, 2:28 PM

  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.)

• by Sosh101 on 11/16/21, 10:08 AM

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

• by tester34 on 11/16/21, 9:39 AM

  >great engineering blogs

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

  I feel like those are different things.

• by softwaredoug on 11/16/21, 1:32 PM

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

• by justshowpost on 11/19/21, 2:42 PM

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

• by alexellisuk on 11/16/21, 1:07 PM

  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.

• by purpleidea on 11/16/21, 9:09 AM

  https://purpleidea.com/blog/ :)

• by gengstrand on 11/16/21, 3:33 PM

  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/

• by perceptronas on 11/16/21, 2:21 PM

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

• by cdiamand on 11/16/21, 2:40 PM

  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.

• by kokizzu3 on 11/16/21, 2:11 PM

  self promote XD not great, not even good

  http://kokizzu.blogspot.com/

• by el_padrinho on 11/16/21, 10:05 PM

  Some about "devops" stuff?