What is your favorite blog to read recently?
87 points by oceanhaiyang
87 points by oceanhaiyang
Especially interesting what it adds beyond an academic paper would.
I'll add more:
The only regularly-updating blog I currently follow is Drew Devault. He's the developer of Sway and wlroots, maintainer of vim-classic, creator of the Hare language, owner of SourceHut, and (FOSS) activist.
I still have catching-up to do on many other blogs, but none of the others I have subscribed to have more than 1 post this year.
https://eli.thegreenplace.net for excellent technical writing https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com for excellent writing that happens to be technical
Currently Sean Geoedecke’s blog: https://www.seangoedecke.com/
His writing focuses a lot on the realpolitik of large tech organizations and it’s really been helping me understand things at work (especially coming from small startups originally).
I like him a lot, even if I don't always agree, it really looks at how management thinks. His series on why a pet project or something you did well doesn't get you the flowers you think you should receive is particularly good.
I don't think I've ever mentally contrasted a blog to an academic paper, it's a completely different domain to me. That said I'll put in a list of my current favorites anyway
there is something about his specific taste for UI, UX, and related domains that makes me audibly groan with praise every time he criticises something. Would recommend too.
Anyone have any blogs they’d recommend covering random silly CS/programming factoids, compilers, or gamedev? Many of my favorites have stopped blogging over the last decade.
Probably many others that are slipping my mind.
Two blogs I check semi-regularly are:
I haven’t seen Fabien’s blog before but it looks great. Thanks for sharing.
If you like his gamedev deep-dive posts, I highly recommend his Game Engine Black Books - they're basically a line-by-line analysis of of Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, along with a history lesson on the computing environment of the time.
https://www.martinfowler.com/ the deep dives are usually detailed, give great examples and the "fragments" (newsletter) has a decent pulse into what's going on in our industry imo.
https://third-bit.com/ especially if you don't have a pure CS background, it's more so oriented at data science people, still has a lot of good content.
https://protesilaos.com/codelog/ one of the pillars of Emacs, just a pleasure to follow.
https://brandur.org/ Cool in general
https://ianthehenry.com/posts/ Janet creator, I can only aspire to understand half the posts there.
https://htmx.org/essays/ Actually, HTMX is more a way of live that one might think, there are even essays!
Correction: Ian Henry wrote Janet for Mortals, the book, but not Janet itself. Great blog, for sure!
I maintain a blogroll on my website with links to everyone I follow via RSS: https://haripm.com/blogroll.
Sidenote: I think blogrolls are fantastic and more people should do them, they're a great way to find interesting new websites to browse/follow.
That's a really good idea! I do this with my resource list on one of my sites where I list other people's good write ups. Never considered doing this for blogs!
Hey, I'm in this list! Thanks for that. I'm gonna subscribe to some of your recommendations.
There are academic authors who blog about their papers and I enjoy those blogs. A blog post explaining a paper can be more colloquial and less verbose than the paper itself, and the author can be more honest when they're just trying to explain their ideas and not to sell them.
In that regard, I quite like https://lemire.me/blog/, where articles like this one explains a paper at a high level (and separately, I find Daniel Lemire's papers quite readable).
A little off-topic, but personally I've found that Lemire tends to oversimplify some posts, and simple examples typically misrepresent the picture. His papers are really good, though.
Some of his posts are surprisingly low-effort, although I haven't seen any evidence of AI usage.
I love https://stonetools.ghost.io/ and it might be the only blog that I'm always, always reading ASAP. It's about old software in its natural environment
Disclaimer, Johnie is a colleague of mine but I have no affiliation with the site, blog, or writing.
In particular: his thoughts on software engineering in the age of LLMs have been some that have challenged my (mostly) anti-LLM-for-coding views. His personal story shared in this post sets the context, where his spinal muscular atrophy type 2 impacted his ability to work as a software engineer, and his AI manifesto is really good IMO.
Wes McKinney (creator of pandas and Apache arrow) has a great site called Spicy Takes (https://spicytakes.org) where he aggregated blogs he likes. There are a lot of great blogs there.
https://www.experimental-history.com/ where Adam Mastroianni writes about experimental psychology and academia
https://passo.uno has thoughtful takes about technical writing e.g. What makes docs beautiful? and Docs-as-code topologies
Some recent gems not yet mentioned:
I keep an extended list on my blogroll: https://trv.rs/blogroll
https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/ emacs, books, movies
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/ tech vs community, with care
https://www.jwz.org/blog/ tech vs community, with an edge
https://leahneukirchen.org/trivium/ interesting tech/knowledge-related links
and htmx, jvns and drew devault as others have mentioned
Probably https://sethmlarson.dev/. I'm a big fan of both Python and video game development and interesting video game technical details so it's a great fit for me.