Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?

716 points by t3rcio 14 years ago | 116 comments

dustingetz 14 years ago |

this stuff never seems to be highly upvoted on HN anymore, and if it gets to +30 there's only a few comments, i speculate because new-school HNers don't understand or care. so i track them myself.

best two advanced swegr blogs ever:

    http://prog21.dadgum.com/ -- swegr, fp theory
    http://www.johndcook.com/blog/ -- swegr, fp theory

other advanced swegr blogs. we're not talking atwood and joel, here, that stuff is for college kids.

    http://blog.tmorris.net/ -- swegr, fp/tactics
    http://james-iry.blogspot.com/ -- fp/tactics
    http://playingwithpointers.com/ -- philosophy, fp/tactics

life

    http://www.jasonshen.com/ -- "Art of Ass Kicking" (life)
    http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/ -- "Strategy, Philosophy, Self-Discipline, Science. Victory." (life)
    http://dilbert.com/blog -- politics & life

fwiw, after having digested much of this material, I've moved on to reading all the interesting whitepapers I can find, mostly via my social networks. That's the really advanced stuff. I've been meaning to collect them and summarize many to post to HN. nag me.

manveru 14 years ago | |

Sorry, but neither DDG nor Google know about the term "swegr", what does it stand for?

count 14 years ago | | |

Given context, 'software engineering', I would assume. Strange way to write it though...

jwallaceparker 14 years ago | | |

To me a "swegr" sounds like it would mean "an outdoor event on a really hot day where you have to dress in formal attire."

Cause you'd sweat a lot.

It probably stands for software engineering, though.

wyclif 14 years ago | | |

Me too. I'd never seen "swegr" before.

sparky 14 years ago | | |

SoftWare EnGineeRing.

patfla 14 years ago | |

I came here with the thought of adding John Cook's blog but I see the name already.

Second the recommendation.

lemming 14 years ago |

The best blogs don't have daily content. In fact, the best blogs usually post once a month, or less - often much less. Here are some:

http://prog21.dadgum.com http://www.moserware.com http://ridiculousfish.com/blog http://wingolog.org/

naner 14 years ago |

http://stevehanov.ca/blog/ -- Updates infrequently. Very good programming articles.

http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/ -- Updates infrequently. Good articles on Linux and Programming. Start here: http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/best-of

http://catonmat.net -- He doesn't update much anymore since he's working on his startup but the archives are still good. Mostly unix tools and CompSci stuff IIRC.

http://chneukirchen.org/trivium/ -- Curates unix and plan9 articles and some lower level/systems programming stuff with a few other peculiarities sprinkled in.

http://www.foldl.org/ -- Curated programming/compsci stuff from certain subreddits. Didn't last long, archives still have some gems.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ -- I actually don't read the articles that often anymore but I scan the titles as if it were a ticker of what's going on in the programming world.

If someone could point me to more curated sources like foldl, I'd appreciate it.

Non-programming:

http://ryanholiday.net -- http://www.ryanholiday.net/an-introduction-to-me/

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/ -- I skip the pharma articles that are way over my head. Cultural deconstructionism.

robyates 14 years ago | |

+1 for Steve Hanov's blog. I enjoyed his post about how programmers/HR review your resume: http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=56

pwelch 14 years ago | |

Duartes' articles are really well written. I had forgotten about his blog. Thanks for re-posting it.

messel 14 years ago |

Here are the ones in my reader, admittedly I haven't visited often enough over the past couple of months:

http://www.igvita.com/

http://ejohn.org/

http://codingrelic.geekhold.com/ (Denny covers assembly and networking issues often in great detail)

http://buhrmi.tumblr.com/

http://elegantcode.com/

http://72lions.com/

http://kellabyte.com/ (mobile-ish dev)

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/

http://ihumanable.com/blog

http://4loc.wordpress.com/

http://www.maxogden.com/

http://till.klampaeckel.de/blog/

http://www.quirkey.com/blog

http://www.mikealrogers.com/

http://cocoawithlove.com/

duck 14 years ago |

I use to have a very big list that I would consume via RSS. I kept making the list smaller and smaller as I wasn't checking it very often and thought that was the reason. Then I realized why: for the most part I was seeing the best of those articles on HN. So now, for my daily reads, it is 100% HN + some curated newsletters I'm subscribed too.

pestaa 14 years ago | |

Please share your preferred newsletters -- I can't seem to find the good ones.

duck 14 years ago | | |

Peter Cooper has three of them that are hard to beat: http://rubyweekly.com, http://javascriptweekly.com, and http://html5weekly.com.

I'll plug mine as well: Hacker Newsletter - http://www.hackernewsletter.com, which is a product of what I said above. :)

sandal 14 years ago | | |

I am the author of "Practicing Ruby" ( http://practicingruby.com ). It's a paid newsletter but I offer it for free for anyone who can't pay for it, and try to release back issues relatively frequently.

Avenger42 14 years ago |

Raymond Chen's blog, The Old New Thing (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing), is still my go-to site for any WinAPI discussion - and he's got plenty to say on the subject of developer & user behavior as well. Come for the brilliance, stay for the snark.

AbyCodes 14 years ago |

There are similar questions in reddit faq: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/faq#Whatprogrammingblogs...

Steve Yegge's archives, http://www.modernperlbooks.com/mt/ are in my favourites, which are not mentioned here so far.

agumonkey 14 years ago |

http://dorophone.blogspot.com/ ;; elisp/picolisp stuff. monads, sexp, fexpr. inspiring.

http://okmij.org/ftp/ ;; general cs ftw. too deep.

http://john.freml.in/ ;; nice http server perf in clisp.

http://www.learningclojure.com/ ;; get the most of clojure in terms of cpu cycles. refreshing.

http://vanillajava.blogspot.com/ ;; perf, lo-level details about java. refreshing.

btw, swegr ~= hacker ?

nolanw 14 years ago | |

> btw, swegr ~= hacker ?

I think it's an abbreviation of 'software engineer(ing)'.

catch404 14 years ago | |

Always enjoy reading johns posts.

ohyes 14 years ago |

http://planet.lisp.org/ Aggregates a bunch of common lisp blogs that are generally interesting.

pjscott 14 years ago | |

On that note, I also read

http://planet.haskell.org/

Generally high quality, interesting stuff if you're into Haskell.

mrspandex 14 years ago |

http://www.thedailywtf.com/

shangaslammi 14 years ago |

The only semi-regularly updated ones I currently have in my RSS reader are:

- James Hague's "Programming in the 21st Century": http://prog21.dadgum.com/

- Edward Z. Yang's blog: http://blog.ezyang.com/

Rest of my daily blog hits I get via Hacker News and reddit/r/haskell

dusklight 14 years ago | |

dadgum has been mentioned a few times in this thread .. could someone please explain why that is a good blog, maybe a link to an article that is insightful?

hernan7 14 years ago | | |

Slow programming languages battle across time: http://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html

A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering: http://prog21.dadgum.com/29.html

taypo 14 years ago |

More on the management side of development, but I like rands a lot http://www.randsinrepose.com/

Pawka 14 years ago |

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2075066/what-are-good-php...

voidfiles 14 years ago |

If you are looking for something that is more front-end specific Paul Irish has put together a really great list of blogs, and made a google reader bundle out of them.

http://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user/1116587048495144532...

Some standout blogs that I always read about programming are:

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/ - Was writing about JS before it was cool, now it just has some of the most detailed coverage you can get of new things happening in js.

http://dailyjs.com/ - a great daily roundup of the news in the JS community

http://www.nczonline.net/ - A developer who lead many FE efforts inside of Yahoo, very outspoken about how JS should work.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ - Joels essays can be a bit cantankerous, but also paradigm changing.

http://sheddingbikes.com/ - pretty much everything that zed shaw does is fucking awesome. Take it with a grain of salt though.

UPDATE:

Oh, I almost forgot steve yegge, http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/ - In a few essays from steve my programming world opened into one of ideas, and not just syntax.

yread 14 years ago |

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/ C# designer

mullr 14 years ago | |

Seconded with enthusiasm. Eric writes at great length about the detailed decisions that go into programming language design, especially revision of an existing language. Even though I should know better, I have been guilty at times of "how hard could it be" syndrome. Reading what Eric says has cured me of that disease. (for programming languages at least)

hasslblad 14 years ago | | |

I agree with this. At first glance the problems he presents are simple, then you realise all the design decisions they've made and the pros and cons of each approach they were aware of when writing C#.

On a footnote I also recommend Jon Skeet: Coding Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/jon_skeet/ He's known in the .Net community. He's the guy behind Tony the Pony. He's a Google staffer who has written some C# books. He goes into great depth about C# stuff.

_delirium 14 years ago |

Far from daily, but Yosef K's blog is usually a good read when he does post:

http://www.yosefk.com/blog/

msbarnett 14 years ago |

Mike Ash's Friday Q&A series is always a great investigation of the depths of Objective-C and Cocoa: http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/

eelco 14 years ago | |

For iOS/Mac development, Ole Begemann's http://oleb.net/ is invaluable, especially for the monthly link roundups.

msbarnett 14 years ago | | |

Awesome, I wasn't aware of that one.

Other good ones I know of are the already mentioned Cocoa with Love

http://cocoawithlove.com/

Cocoa is my girlfriend

http://www.cimgf.com/

and bbum's weblog-o-matic

http://www.friday.com/bbum/

icebraining 14 years ago |

Daily, none, but I have some on my RSS reader; besides the ones already posted:

http://julien.danjou.info/blog/index.html ← Julien Danjou, Awesome WM main (only?) dev.

http://ejohn.org/ ← John Resig, jQuery creator and lead dev

http://codeutopia.net/blog/

smoyer 14 years ago |

Curious that I'm not following any of the blogs listed below ... I suspect that there are so many that we could each read quality content and have very little overlap. Of course, there are theory blogs that would apply to the whole group, but many of the blogs are also language/domain specific and so only a subset of us would be interested.

perlgeek 14 years ago |

    http://planetsix.perl.org/ -- Perl 6
    http://ironman.enlightenedperl.org/ -- Perl 5

GlennS 14 years ago |

I quite enjoy these: http://ayende.com/blog (.NET centric, writes RavenDB/NHibernate Profiler) http://blog.headius.com/ (JRuby creator)

Yhippa 14 years ago |

I used to frequent Slashdot and DZone but all I have time for these days is HN. This place is fairly good at promoting good stories and the comments are usually as good as Slashdot so I feel like I don't need to go anywhere else (for now).

quadhome 14 years ago |

First, go through the archives of http://anarchaia.org/ Then follow http://chneukirchen.org/trivium

berkerpeksag 14 years ago |

http://neugierig.org/software/blog/

http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/

instigateme 14 years ago |

I try to read from FolkLore.ORg as often as I can - it's not a daily read and there's not much new stuff, but it's off the beaten path and the old stories of Bill and Steve and Woz are pure win.

Osiris 14 years ago |

I read Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew, which is a .NET resource. He posts links to tons of articles every morning on 10 different topics. It's fun to read up on such a variety of different topics.

http://www.alvinashcraft.com

I also read the Daily WTF every day. It's great to have a chance to look at crappy code and try to re-write it in your head on how it should have been done.

http://www.thedailywtf.com

benbscholz 14 years ago |

This summer I really enjoyed reading the joelonsoftware archives. The last update was mid-September, but the previous posts kept me busy for quite some time.

suyash 14 years ago |

I only read HN for all the tech news/updates. I'm done with blogs now, it's too much out there and I only want the best. HN does a good job with that.

MaxGfeller 14 years ago |

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/ is also an interesting blog to read.

octopus 14 years ago |

http://altdevblogaday.com/

This is a blog with multiple authors, so I check this once a day.

captaintk 14 years ago |

I can highly recommend http://blog.cdleary.com/

Manuelito 14 years ago |

This is my favorite:

http://glowingpython.blogspot.com/

kolsen 14 years ago |

I like reading Scott Hanselman:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog

I also like this one with his series (back in 2008) on coding poker bots but he hasn't posted in a while:

http://www.codingthewheel.com/

nikkaelle 14 years ago |

It's not specifically a programming blog, but I find "A List Apart" (http://www.alistapart.com/articles/) to be a great resource for the design side of creating software.

olalonde 14 years ago |

This one should be quite popular among the HN crowd although it's not strictly programming related.

http://www.lesswrong.com - A community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality

sidwyn 14 years ago |

Are my eyes playing tricks on me or is the title supposed to read 'What programming blogs do you read daily?' instead of 'What programming blogs your read daily?'

Both have subtle differences that poke at the perfectionist in me.

nxn 14 years ago |

http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/ Updates have gotten sort of rare lately, but it is hands down my favorite JS blog.

steamer25 14 years ago |

Not a blog per se but I do check it most weekdays: http://stackoverflow.com/?tab=week

stevek 14 years ago |

Entertaining rants, compression (data & image) & general sweng.

http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/

IGT 14 years ago |

For a little bit on BIOS I go here: http://sites.google.com/site/pinczakko/

amitvjtimub 14 years ago |

I created this app for visiting multiple sites you visit daily from one place:

http://www.morningtabs.com/

Give it a try.

_neil 14 years ago | |

background-size: cover;

amitvjtimub 14 years ago | | |

Thanks

iskander 14 years ago | |

Can I log in with something other than facebook?

zackb 14 years ago |

I've always liked Ryan Flynn's blog and link collection http://www.parseerror.com/

allan_ 14 years ago |

http://got-ravings.blogspot.com/ by the vim-nerdtree dude. very funny.

dmitrykoval 14 years ago |

Artima developer, http://www.artima.com/index.jsp - Java, Scala mostly

googletron 14 years ago |

I tend to frequent http://www.mahdiyusuf.com The Dusty Programmer

BadassFractal 14 years ago |

I'm curious, why is Coding Horror not in your lists? Is it too high level to be considered a programming blog?

dlapiduz 14 years ago |

For some Ruby/Rails stuff I follow:

rubyinside.com

yehudakatz.com

weblog.rubyonrails.org

phatboyslim 14 years ago |

The Morning Brew http://blog.cwa.me.uk/

Omnipresent 14 years ago |

http://martinfowler.com/tags/

sure051 14 years ago |

BTW may i know what testing blogs do you read daily which would be more informative?

larrydag 14 years ago |

http://www.r-bloggers.com/

absconditus 14 years ago |

http://blog.plover.com/

ochronus 14 years ago |

http://blog.mostof.it/

r3570r3 14 years ago |

"Joel on software" and "Coding horror" are my all time favorite.

friendlytuna 14 years ago |

java.dzone.com css.dzone.com www.dzone.com/mz/devops www.dzone.com/mz/html5

All updated with new content almost every day, and the quality is getting stronger.

swah 14 years ago |

dekorte.com (rare post on programming, but its nice to see a language implementor bashing on fp sometimes)

earl 14 years ago |

Joe Damato has a great albeit infrequently updated programming blog, http://timetobleed.com/ . I think he wrote the memprof ruby gem. Posts HN may really enjoy:

an obscure kernel feature to get more info about dying processes [1]

a presentation from some ruby conf, particularly slide set 2 which details how memprof works and talks about the abi, etc [2]

plus a bunch of discussion of profiling tools to look at exactly what gcc or your vm of choice are doing. Highly recommended.

[1] http://timetobleed.com/an-obscure-kernel-feature-to-get-more...

[2] http://timetobleed.com/slides-from-mwrc-2010/

afdssfda 14 years ago |

None.

I read a number of blogs when I search, but there are none that I go to daily just to read them.

cpfohl 14 years ago |

news.ycombinator.com

rektide 14 years ago |

Programming blogs post daily????

TechboyUK 14 years ago |

It depends what posts appear in my RSS reader :-)