Tech Blogs that I Follow

Date published: February 24, 2019

A lot of times I think and reflect about what kinds of skills I wish I could've compounded earlier on in my software engineering career. Tech communities like Reddit and Hacker News (HN) led me to believe that, on aggregate, the marginal cost of acquiring information is now nearly zero, as just about anything can be looked up online at any time by most folks. But it was hard to tell signal from noise. My first year was just me reading and believing everything written online but not having a strong mental model to absorb/refute certain points.

Here's a list of sites/newsletters that I've compiled over the years and still visit regularly in trying to better understand tech topics. I can only wish to have this early on, but still fortunate that it was late than never. With that said, software engineering is a broad (and getting broader!) field, so what I have here might not be of interest to you. YMMV.

Engineering

Dan Luu

The man writes really interesting systems software related articles. Good, insightful writeups on modern computer performance benchmarks.

Julia Evans

She also has really good art/drawing skills. Her zines are pretty cool!

Jessie Frazelle

I first heard of her in a 2015 LinuxCon tech talk she put together to describe her Docker workflow, and the room was PACKED. Looked up her technical writings, and I wasn't disappointed.

Chris Wellons

Lots of good coverage on C and C++ material.

Herb Sutter

Yay more C++ material!

Robert Heaton

I first stumbled upon his blog via HN postings and found his HTTPS writeups really interesting.

Brendan Gregg

Very cool low level, system performance content. I've learned a ton from his blogs as well as from his Systems Performance book.

Bruce Schneier

Great articles on computer security. Some are highly technical, others linger on a higher level regarding ethics and computer security policies.

Ciro S. Costa

Good engineering writeups. I liked the "Month of /proc" posts the most.

Greg Brockman

The cofounder and CTO (at time of writing) has pretty posts on some technical topics as well as startup experiences.

LWN.net

Linux and free software stuff.

Code Words by Recurse Center

Great content written by the RC community. There's also some interesting talks by prominent tech folks.

The morning paper (newsletter) by Adrian Colyer

Adrian typically writes up a summary of a paper he read recently. Some of them are very technical, but there's breadth across many major computer science topics.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare has been putting together really interesting content on the work they've been doing, including DDoS mitigation strategies.

Netflix

Heavy on distributed systems topics. Netflix's engineering team also open sourced Chaos Monkeys.

Increment magazine

This is a magazine with issues released every quarter by Stripe. There's generally a theme for each issue, from cloud provisioning to internationalization.

Sysdig

Machine Learning

Andrej Karpathy
François Chollet
Christopher Olah
Andrew Trask
OpenAI
Google AI
DeepMind

Product / Startups

Gwern
Paul Graham
Sam Altman
Kalzumeus Software by Patrick McKenzie
Y Combinator Blog
Fred Wilson
Brad Feld
Both Sides of the Table by Mark Suster
Andreessen Horowitz
Patrick Collison
Kevin Kwok
Eugene Wei
Chris Dixon
Jason Calacanis
Stratechery by Ben Thompson

That's all Folks!

There's too many great tech companies/organizations that have good technical writeups on their recent product / internal software launches but didn't appear on this list. I find them too verbose to put here. I did call out a few though such as Netflix or Cloudflare that have released great articles consistently that they're always on my radar.