Ask HN: What are good solo developer blogs that you enjoy reading?

[lucasfdacunha]

Hey guys, I like to read blog bosts about developers that run some kind of project (rentable or not) and usually are pretty open about its development and how things are going.

However, it's really hard to find some of those, unless you found those somewhere. Hacker Newsletter today had a pretty good article https://mtlynch.io/solo-developer-year-2/

I'm mostly looking for something similar since this kind of blog post can give some good insights.

Thanks.

[enriquto]

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

[notjustanymike]

Did I just run Windows 2000 on my Pixel???

[avinassh]

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

they are quite informative and very enjoyable to read.

[ganstyles]

I really enjoy these, but they're really for an entry level audience. See, e.g., how to do a select query in SQL. Good to know, for sure, and helpful if you're unfamiliar with SQL, but definitely really basic. Love the drawings though, and I could see if I were just getting into being an SWE or aspired to be one, they could be a good starting point.

[shaklee3]

For low-level software, these are great:

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/

https://travisdowns.github.io/

https://preshing.com/

[huhtenberg]

Good blogs, but I wouldn't call them focused on "low-level" software. The material is more of a conventional desktop software development.

[gengstrand]

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).

[0x445442]

Great idea for a blog! Is there any reason you have not ventured into the serverless realm? It would be interesting to hear the take on that ecosystem from someone who has such experience with microservice stacks.

[SyneRyder]

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...

[new_here]

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

[Pmop]

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.

[lucasfdacunha]

Do you have the link to those that you've mentioned?

[koenigdavidmj]

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.

[mark_l_watson]

Thanks for posting that. I went down a rabbit hole reading his off the grid material. I live in a fairly small mountain town but still with a civilized lifestyle: I can easily walk to two health food stores, movie theater, library, and the local food bank where I enjoy volunteering. My wife and I talked about moving ten miles outside of town but decided against it.

I also like Joey’s Haskell projects. Good stuff.

[philsnow]

I had never looked into who ran olduse.net, turns out it's Joey Hess. Joey if you're reading this, thank you, I love it!

[Topgamer7]

His fridge build is pretty great!

[sixhobbits]

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/...

[DyslexicAtheist]

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

[ashnehete]

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/

[gmcquistin]

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

[young_unixer]

https://drewdevault.com

[yuri91]

I second this, but all of his posts hit the front page of HN anyway, no need to actively follow it! (/s)

[spectramax]

I quite enjoy reading what Drew has to say. Something about his transparency, his intense honesty, his approach, minimalism, objectivity and slight tinge of libertarianism - it is quite refreshing. Not to mention all of this through the lens of software engineering.

[rounakdatta]

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

[kamaal]

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.

[montyhallpy]

What is a "fresher"? Freshman?

[kmatthewc]

https://vorpus.org/blog

I was particularly influenced by this post.

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

[eitland]

Reading the last one now. Haven't made up my mind yet but the writing is great so far.

[huhtenberg]

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.

[fulldecent2]

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/

[brandon272]

I stumbled upon Corbin's Treehouse back in the late 90s when I was a kid researching... treehouses! Was enthralled by his treehouse construction and still visit from time to time for all the other content.

[simonw]

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/

[cpach]

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)