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Picking favorites is hard, and so is being exhaustive - so here's a random smorgasbord of things I like.
Programming Blogs
I once heard Seamus Heaney quote T.S. Eliot as saying that he first got his highs from reading different poems - and later, as he matured, he started picking favorite authors and extensively reading their work. When it comes to blogs, I'm definitely in the former category - there is no blog I've read every single post of. But here are some that I've found helpful or interesting, multiple times.
- Joel on Software - Long gone dark, I feel like it's popular to pile on some of Joel's advice now (like never rewriting or hiring testers), but I'm immensely grateful I was told to read Joel in my spare time during my first internship. The Joel Test, Leaky Abstractions, and more are classic, well-written articles that gave me a good start as a new developer.
- Coding Horror - Joel's literal partner-in-crime (they co-founded Stack Overflow), I don't remember any specific blog post by Jeff Atwood, but the sum total of reading a bunch of them was "oh, this is the stuff professional programmers do." Grab a handful and read, being aware that here be opinions - like all of these, I guess.
- Dan Luu - A terrible-looking website with some excellent, usually very-long posts from a Google/Twitter engineer, often challenging conventional wisdom with data. Benchmarking is underrated, I could do that in a weekend!, and We only hire the trendiest are some favorites of mine. A good counter-balance to the "conventional" wisdom of the above.
- Erik Sink - An old Microsoft alum blog I found via praise from Dan Luu. I'm coming to him late, but Developers, Not Programmers and Marketing for Geeks are great reminders that the best programmers don't just write code - they solve problems, with code (usually).
- Julia Evans - A wide-ranging (and still active!) blog on a ton of topics, from the gnarliest Unix CLI bugs to how to ask good questions - Julia seems to focus on explaining confusing topics as clearly as possible. I also love her comics/zines, too - The Pocket Guide to Debugging and So you want to be a wizard are by miles the best debugging guides I've read (and hands-down the most fun). If you have 5 minutes, read a debugging manifesto.
- Marc Brooker - Another Dan Luu recommendation, an AWS engineer who posts a mix of distributed system stuff and general career advice. Being a sane-minded individual who's rightly scared of distributed systems theory, I've gravitated towards the career advice. Getting Big Things Done and How Do You Spend Your Time? are both worthwhile. Although, okay, on the technical side Why do we need distributed systems? got through even my thick skull.
- Ben Kuhn - A startup-CTO-turned-Anthropic-manager who tends to post a lot of "life advice for engineers" stuff (along with having some pretty great lists of programming blogs I occasionally nip at). I haven't read most of it (and don't agree with everything), but it's always thoughtful. How I've run major projects, In defense of blub studies, and Why and how to write things on the Internet were all worth reading.