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Ask HN: What are some great engineering blogs?

281 points| ingvar77 | 4 years ago

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

56 comments

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msadowski|4 years ago

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.

tmaly|4 years ago

Any great robotics blogs for a younger audience?

mjfl|4 years ago

thanks for the list!

speps|4 years ago

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|4 years ago

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|4 years ago

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/

colinwilyb|4 years ago

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

brandrick|4 years ago

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

jrmiii|4 years ago

I also really appreciate the curation and simplicity of this site - it's my go to resource.

If anyone's interested, they provide the full OPML as well.

zonovar|4 years ago

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

Kelteseth|4 years ago

I came here to post the same link. I'm always fascinated about his ETW traces blog posts on how to discover performance bottlenecks. Great guy!

exaltation|4 years ago

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

mooreds|4 years ago

+1 for Rands. Focus is less on day to day engineering and more on management, but it's fantastic for the latter.

His books are good too.

replyifuagree|4 years ago

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...

mgbmtl|4 years ago

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/

jpgvm|4 years ago

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|4 years ago

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|4 years ago

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 :)

ryanchants|4 years ago

I used to enjoy DiscoverDev and recommended it to everyone, but the RSS feed is never updated any more, so I thought it was stagnant.

MilnerRoute|4 years ago

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|4 years ago

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

jwdunne|4 years ago

I used to enjoy this but came back to it recently and sadly seems chock full of promotional content with interesting stuff much harder to find.

tester34|4 years ago

>great engineering blogs

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

I feel like those are different things.

slimsag|4 years ago

I don't know, it can definitely be done-I'm doing it for my personal stuff[0] it just takes explicit effort to write about what you are actually doing.

Unless you're suggesting only large startups / teams can create great engineering work, which, like, I don't really agree with at all.

[0] https://devlog.hexops.com

ingvar77|4 years ago

I feel I’ve confused a lot of people but really I mean “software engineering”.

softwaredoug|4 years ago

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

alexellisuk|4 years ago

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.

gengstrand|4 years ago

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/