There
are hundreds of blogs in the blogosphere that talks about software
design, processes and methodologies, on how to write awesome code and be
a better software engineer. But there are a few that not only excel in
putting forward their ideas in all these areas but they give a lot more
to ponder over. This blog lists down top 7 bloggers that are pioneers in the field of software engineering, building products and influencing startups. It also list down top 7 engineering blogs from world's best software companies that are solving complex problems at scale. If you are looking to improve your skills as software engineer and learn from the world's best, I would suggest to follow these bloggers and engineering blogs. Some of them do not regularly update their blogs, so I suggest to browse through and see what topics are of your interest.
Top 7 Bloggers
Most of the people and their blogs that I am listing here, have their own unique way of pouring over ideas that makes you think hard. Some of them compliment each other, some contradicts and some are completely isolated that covers pretty much every point of view about software processes and ideas in general.
1. Martin Fowler Best known for the books like Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, he is the person to follow if you want to understand the magic behind developing software using good patterns. He has years of experience around software's best practices in various topics such as test driven development (TDD), debugging, team productivity and so on.
2. Kent Beck He does not need any introduction but in case you don’t know, he is the creator of xUnit family of testing tools and best known for his contribution to Extreme Programming and Test Driven Development. Extreme programming is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development, it advocates frequent releases in short development cycles, intended to improve productivity and introduce checkpoints at which new customer requirements can be adopted.
3. Paul Graham
The co-founder of the famous startup incubator Y Combinator who
communicates through his essays, gives an amazing view of various
aspects, from his early blogs on hacking and programming to his current
passion about startups and entrepreneurship. He has even books on Lisp and the famous one - Hackers and Painters.
4. Jeff Atwood Another excellent writer who blogs almost anything and everything related to software and other topics. He is the co-founder of Stack Overflow, the knowledge bank that every software developer has to visit more than a thousand times in his life.
5. Andy Hunt If you are a fan of Pragmatic Programmer series, then you mush follow the founder’s blog. His classic The Pragmatic Programmer book is the must read. The Pragmatic Programmer illustrates the best approaches and major pitfalls of many different aspects of software development. Whether you’re a new coder, an experienced programmer, or a manager responsible for software projects, use these lessons daily, and you’ll quickly see improvements in personal productivity, accuracy, and job satisfaction. You’ll learn skills and develop habits and attitudes that form the foundation for long-term success in your career.
6. Joel Spolsky Most of the time this guy makes a lot of sense to me, but sometimes I think why do I even follow his blog. I guess I like to be surprised when I am reading his blogs, I don’t know.
7. Steve Yegge Pure fun. Period.
Top 7 Engineering Blogs
If you are looking to learn about various software engineering topics that world's best technical companies work on, then follow the below blogs. You will learn a lot from distributed systems problems, networking to frontend.
1. Meta Engineering - Meta does not need any introduction, we all use their products one way or another. But this blog of theirs is a gold mine of lot of topics on solving complex problems in various areas from distributed systems to frontends.
2. Netflix Engineering - Netflix's blog is full of wisdom around building scalable, distributed systems. They deal with a massive scale of streaming thousands of movies and videos all around the world. They have problems to solve from managing large amount of data, optimizing streaming over network, optimizing clients to stream without interruption and so on. They are one of the largest AWS customers and use cloud for their entire infrastructure.
3. Airbnb - This is another great resource from Airbnb engineering on various problems they have solved over the years. My favorite ones are on Mussel - key value store, rebuilding payment orchestration, Metis - data management platform to name a few.
4. LinkedIn Engineering - LinkedIn is another company who has pioneered in building a lot of open source projects for solving number of data related problems from a data streaming platform like Kafka to graph databases to machine learning infrastructure.
5. Dropbox Engineering - Dropbox is another data company that deals with moving around and storing a lot of data. They pioneered building an application that syncs folders in your laptops and computers seamlessly to cloud. This became a defacto on how to integrate cloud based application without interfering the end user experience. Their blog talks about various topics in the fields of data, security, machine learning, and infrastructure.
6. Twitter Engineering - Twitter (or X) is another company that deals with lot of complex problems around managing data. They have lot of blogs on various backend infrastructure, improving search, data quality, and machine learning. They haven't updated the blog over the last few months but it is still a real good resource to learn how a company like Twitter manages data at scale.
7. Yahoo Engineering - This last one from Yahoo seems to be an old archive now with no updates in last few years. But Yahoo was one of the first large technical companies that has built a lot of products from search to news. They have built lot of software systems before a lot of existing tech companies. This blog refers to lot of open source projects that Yahoo has worked on and are a great read to understand various distributed systems such as key value store for data analysis and deep learning systems.