Blog posts where I find quality really shows are usually about something I know next to nothing about how it works. A badly written article usually either goes really shallow or skips some facts when going into depth and requires catchup elsewhere to actually understand it. The lidar article from Main Street Autonomy goes beyond basics and explained everything from the ground up in such a connected way that it was a real pleasure reading it.
Sounds like you look for an intersection of academic papers (1.), tech blogs (2.), text books (3.), and confidential business strategies (4.)? A very high ambition.
Corporations commonly describe some of their internal processes and achievements because it builds reputation and that can be important for both sales and recruitment.
Sometimes they do it in the form of free or open source software releases.
You're probably looking for something that is more focused on specific software decisions/implementations, but https://infrequently.org is the best web development blog out there.
It's not "technical" so much as it just educates you on how to be a good web developer/run a team. There's zero fluff and considerable detail (footnotes are practically blog posts themselves).
There are no such blogs. Usually companies, or individuals, will write these after they implement some feature into their products. Which makes them inherently little pieces of information scattered all over the internet and there is no one blog that is just about this.
> I am quite surprised and a bit disappointed that almost none of them have RSS.
I think it's on purpose. It is to signal that these (those without RSS) aren't really "engineering" blogs at all, they're marketing websites aimed to help with recruiting and making the organization seem "engineering-like".
Exactly, so if the blog doesn't have RSS, you know they're probably made from marketers with no input from engineering, otherwise they'd have RSS on the blogs.
Edit: Ah, noticed I made a without/with typo, fixed that, should make about 2% more sense now for the ones who the original meaning was unclear :)
> It is to signal that these (those with RSS) aren't really "engineering" blogs at all
So now when I corrected that with/without typo, it looks like your previous comment doesn't make sense, but it kind of did, at the time. Sorry about that and thanks for making me realize the typo!
Had the same thought. ChatGPT often tells me things like: "This is the hard truth" or "I am telling it to you as it is (no fluff)" or whatever. Just because my initial prompt contains a line about it not making things up and telling me how things are instead of what would please me to hear. I added a line to specifically tell it to not phrase out these things, but it appears to be surprisingly hard to get rid of those phrases.
I'm not beating up on OP but I chuckled when I read the question. Literally the only place I see the phrase "no fluff" with any frequency is with Deepseek lol.
Nothing wrong with the phrase itself of course, other than the fact that it's like literally in every other reply for me lol.
Some people act like the use of an LLM immediately invalidates or lowers the value of a piece of content. But the case of a question or simple post, especially by somebody for whom English is second language, using an LLM to rephrase or clean-up some text seems like an innocent and practical use case for LLMs.
You seem to be new here, so you probably don't know that:
- Even if you separate each point with a new line,
- HN formatter will join everything to one line anyway.
- So it's not OP's fault his points are in the same line, because the source post has them in separate lines.
No judgement here whatsoever, but i think LLM would be "the" tool for this job. I also wonder if there's any point to "Ask" sections in websites after LLM's.
I'm a huge fan of https://eblog.fly.dev/index.html. The author, Efron, very graciously advises me on a lot of little things around my engineering practice, and I've learned a huge amount about weird holes in my practice from industry dysfunction in a very short period of time from him.
The artifacts are usually beautiful from good Workmanship Standards, Design For Manufacturability, and systematic Metrology. Dragging us all into the future one project at a time.
Note that training an ML model with such data would be pointless, as statistical saliency forms a paradox with consumer product design compromises. Note, there are _always_ tradeoffs in every problem domain.
Francesco Mazzoli’s blog on https://mazzo.li/archive.html. His blog has topped HN a few times with various low-level/linux topics, some deep dives into algorithms etc.
Not a blog, but books detailing real-world experiences from Indian Engineers/Scientists/Researchers; Quite inspiring to see how people strive unceasingly towards a goal in spite of all the limitations and hurdles (viz. Political/Financial/Material etc.) imposed on them.
https://jvns.ca/
Not a tech. company blog. Explains technical concepts clearly and top notch technical posts. Fits 1,2, 3 criteria of what you ask, though not the 4th one.
Yes! Julia is fantastic at explaining concepts, and creating ways to learn about them. She produces a great series of “zines” summarizing a bunch of technical topics, her blog archives are really fascinating, and she’s created really useful tools like Mess With DNS (https://messwithdns.net) which gives you your own DNS subdomain and the means to update records so you can try things out in an easy, harmless way.
Strong recommend! Julia's posts are always really engaging and educational.
She also publishes a number of technical topics as ZINES. I bought her "Oh Shit, Git!" zine and learned a ton of useful info, despite having decades in the industry.Zines are a great way to encourage book-allergic coworkers into learning great material.
A lot of great links here to the firehose (or at least for working parents). Unless someone has built it - anything that aggregates and shows beyond the first click of the by-line. (i.e. a first paragraph, or LLM-summary of the content)?
Otherwise... coming soon from a vibe-coding session near you...
We'll filter an RSS feed based on the topic and description that you provide. Feel free to reach out to me at s.kufuor@<domain> if you have any questions or feedback.
A friend and I worked on a startup together that did this back when only the GPT-3 API was available. Sucked up everything we could think of, including HN and traditionally opaque sources such as Telegram
It's so interesting to me as a Mechanical Engineer and Hardware designer/architect how on HN "Engineering" almost always means "Software engineering" here.
I would love more blogs on mechanical, hardware, and especially industrial engineering, but the demographics in those areas skew stereo-typically older and also likely less blog-oriented, right?
Blogs are almost 30 years old at this point, but yes, I do associate a nearly compulsive need to show off one's work in meticulously-crafted blog posts with younger people.
Depending on what you're looking for in industrial engineering, there are a lot of blogs on lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System. INFORMS, may be paywalled, also publishes a lot of pretty interesting articles on applications of operations research to industry.
In general, though, my very limited experience working in manufacturing was that much of the blog equivalents were covered in things like white papers from hardware manufacturers or articles in trade publications. We always had a bunch of magazines delivered each month and there were usually some interesting articles to review.
It is funny, almost as funny as an entire cadre of people with “engineer” in their title who've never had to draw a free body diagram, learn circuit analysis, understand the basics of thermodynamics, or the mechanics of materials.
I hold a CS master degree from an Eastern European university and everything you listed was in our Bachelor degree program. It’s pretty funny because while studying material properties back then I always wondered how and when am I gonna use that. It kind of makes sense now that I think about it - some students preferred branching out to hardware.
That’s great, unfortunately it is quite rare for CS undergrad programs in the US to require the basic engineering and science classes the other engineering/science majors require.
I remember feeling sheepish when I was hired to a position titled 'Software Engineer'. To me, those two words together seemed incongruent. Not quite an oxymoron but certainly a puzzlement.
Maybe, generously, in retrospect, an aspiration?
I never considered myself an actual engineer; I was (and still am) a self-taught un-credentialed computer programmer. More art than science. They made me take the title and the stock options and the business cards.
I mostly worked for and with EEs, making software tools for test automation. I was a fanboy hardware wannabee (and still am), got some on me but was never a true engineer. I learned from those who practiced their discipline; it was plain to me the reality of real engineering versus what I was doing.
I suppose in my travels I have on occasion encountered a true Software Engineer. I suppose there's reason to hope that software development will continue to mature and evolve, and eventually the other engineering disciplines will accept software as a science.
For me, it will always be a joy to make that hardware work with my twiddly bits. Not engineering, no. But very rewarding work that often resembles engineering.
Hear hear. The word "Technology" has also been redefined to mean computer or phone stuff. As a real (manly) engineer, this pisses me off no end! :-)
To answer the OP, this Civil engineering blog / video site is really good. I always learn something new, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Well worth giving it a look:
Yeah, even as a software engineering type I immediately thought the question was too broadly posed. I assume the OP must have had something narrower in mind.
Perhaps. Sometimes the scale is "one" - the amount of engineering that goes into bespoke space missions is very large, and very little of that work is re-used for anything other than direct follow up missions
Not corporate, but two of the best individual developer blogs are Eli Bendersky's and Rachel by the Bay. They've both been blogging prolifically for a decade+, Eli with a focus on, broadly, compilers and Rachel on SRE/debugging.
Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing is also required reading for anyone that works with Windows.
A while ago I felt this "information fatigue" due to the overwhelming updates from the typical news sources (reddit, twitter, even hn).
So I built a _slow_ webdev newsfeed aggregator that doesn't overwhelm you of constant updates, so you focus on reading the actual blog contents and enjoy other things.
I bookmarked to take a closer look later, but I'm a little unclear on the premise, could you explain what you mean by "slow"/how it is filtered/curated?
Problem I had with the other newsfeeds is that I get distracted by the constant updates, always refresh the front-page, skipping the actual content and just skimming through headlines and comments.
So I built this one, set it as my homepage, and because it doesn't update often, I will actually read the content of the links. When I'm done, I move on to other things in life.
It's curated by matching keywords (focusing on web development) on HN, mostly automated but with few manual adjustments now and then.
While not exactly a blog, I've collected ~16 years of [startup] engineering lessons into a book and I think it came out fantastic. People are saying super nice things.
Hey! Check out https://devblogs.sh. It's a curated library with tech blog from companies, as well as individuals and conferences. Every blog is hand picked. There is also AI agent which you can use for quick search.
https://www.redblobgames.com/ is not strictly speaking a blog, but an interested collection of articles on algorithmic concepts you might want to know for writing games.
from a Phd maths guy, who's worked in satellite comms, and blogs on software defined radio and comms protocols (eg error correction and radio modulation, often in space related contexts, eg decoding Voyager comms).
yrand | a day ago
Blog posts where I find quality really shows are usually about something I know next to nothing about how it works. A badly written article usually either goes really shallow or skips some facts when going into depth and requires catchup elsewhere to actually understand it. The lidar article from Main Street Autonomy goes beyond basics and explained everything from the ground up in such a connected way that it was a real pleasure reading it.
qznc | a day ago
gchamonlive | a day ago
cess11 | a day ago
Sometimes they do it in the form of free or open source software releases.
tester756 | a day ago
https://projectzero.google/archive.html
https://netflixtechblog.medium.com/
https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/engineering/
nchmy | a day ago
It's not "technical" so much as it just educates you on how to be a good web developer/run a team. There's zero fluff and considerable detail (footnotes are practically blog posts themselves).
tekichan | a day ago
gethly | a day ago
[OP] nishilpatel | 14 hours ago
I’m trying to surface and study those scattered examples—especially the ones that explain why decisions were made, not just what was built.
Agingcoder | a day ago
throw_await | a day ago
pella | a day ago
https://engineering.fb.com/
https://netflixtechblog.com/
https://stripe.com/blog/engineering
https://eng.uber.com
https://engineering.linkedin.com/
https://engineering.atspotify.com/
https://tailscale.com/blog
https://careersatdoordash.com/engineering-blog/
https://dropbox.tech/
--
Aggregators:( https://engineering.fyi/ ; https://diff.blog/ )
+ https://hn.algolia.com/?query=engineering%20blog
---
create a public engineering-blog SKILL.md. ( ~ collect the writing patterns that work on HN )
i_k | a day ago
But thank you!
petercooper | a day ago
phrotoma | a day ago
petercooper | 23 hours ago
onion2k | a day ago
https://engineering.atspotify.com/feed
https://tailscale.com/blog/index.xml
embedding-shape | a day ago
I think it's on purpose. It is to signal that these (those without RSS) aren't really "engineering" blogs at all, they're marketing websites aimed to help with recruiting and making the organization seem "engineering-like".
zbentley | a day ago
embedding-shape | a day ago
Edit: Ah, noticed I made a without/with typo, fixed that, should make about 2% more sense now for the ones who the original meaning was unclear :)
zbentley | a day ago
embedding-shape | a day ago
> It is to signal that these (those with RSS) aren't really "engineering" blogs at all
So now when I corrected that with/without typo, it looks like your previous comment doesn't make sense, but it kind of did, at the time. Sorry about that and thanks for making me realize the typo!
reallydoubtful | a day ago
* https://engineering.fb.com/feed
* https://netflixtechblog.com/feed
* No feed for stripe
* https://www.uber.com/en-GB/blog/london/engineering/rss/
* No feed for LinkedIn
* https://engineering.atspotify.com/feed
* https://tailscale.com/blog/index.xml
* https://careersatdoordash.com/engineering-blog/feed
* https://dropbox.tech/feed
omgitspavel | a day ago
KomoD | 23 hours ago
spondyl | 23 hours ago
javcasas | 7 hours ago
Ugh. That looks like AI this, LLM that, Agent this.
Where are the databases, the distributed systems, where is the software verification?
vogu66 | a day ago
mitjam | a day ago
atoav | a day ago
runlaszlorun | a day ago
Nothing wrong with the phrase itself of course, other than the fact that it's like literally in every other reply for me lol.
x187463 | a day ago
xnorswap | a day ago
For example: The Architecture of Open Source Applications
https://aosabook.org/en/index.html
alhirzel | a day ago
leoh | 22 hours ago
pveierland | a day ago
https://www.tweag.io/blog
vibesareoff | a day ago
sieste | a day ago
ozim | a day ago
sieste | a day ago
themafia | a day ago
Sort of makes you miss "move fast and break things."
bell-cot | a day ago
vibesareoff | a day ago
But sure, cheer on the homogenization of online spaces into beige slop staccato bullshit!
˙ ͜ʟ˙
bell-cot | a day ago
fnordlord | a day ago
It was a great question and now I have a ton of new things on my reading list.
loloquwowndueo | a day ago
Always happens to me (and I don’t use fucking LLMs) so I’d really like to know.
CamperBob2 | a day ago
self_awareness | 23 hours ago
- Even if you separate each point with a new line, - HN formatter will join everything to one line anyway. - So it's not OP's fault his points are in the same line, because the source post has them in separate lines.
back2reddit | 11 hours ago
date
of
an
account
means
nothing,
bro.
Gold
star
for
the
decade
of
participation
though!
asupkay | a day ago
voxleone | a day ago
robofanatic | 21 hours ago
ludicity | a day ago
Okkef | a day ago
Antirez' blog (of Redis fame) https://antirez.com/
Simon Willison's blog (about AI) https://simonwillison.net/
john-tells-all | a day ago
His "Today I Learned" series is an extremely useful selection of small learnings: https://til.simonwillison.net/
noam_k | a day ago
louiechristie | a day ago
louiechristie | a day ago
bzGoRust | a day ago
thundergolfer | a day ago
mkosmul | a day ago
Joel_Mckay | a day ago
1. https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/
2. https://standards.nasa.gov/standard/NASA/NASA-STD-87394
3. https://standards.nasa.gov/NASA-Technical-Standards
4. https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/workmanship
5. https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...
7. https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/laboratory-metrology/metrology-...
8. https://www.mitutoyo.com/training-education/
9. "Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm )
The artifacts are usually beautiful from good Workmanship Standards, Design For Manufacturability, and systematic Metrology. Dragging us all into the future one project at a time.
Note that training an ML model with such data would be pointless, as statistical saliency forms a paradox with consumer product design compromises. Note, there are _always_ tradeoffs in every problem domain.
'What it actually means to be "AI Generated"' ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERiXDhLHxmo )
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXbzktx1KfU
Have a nice day, and note >52% of the web is LLM slop now. YMMV =3
sevazhidkov | a day ago
nickmonad | a day ago
avisk | a day ago
snvzz | a day ago
0. https://microkerneldude.org/
alzamos | a day ago
sdairs | a day ago
GeoAtreides | a day ago
robofanatic | a day ago
rramadass | a day ago
There is much to learn, in these books.
The Mind of an Engineer by Purnendu Ghosh et al. - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-10-0119-2
The Mind of an Engineer: Volume 2 by Purnendu Ghosh et al. - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-15-1330-5
simonw | a day ago
sateesh | a day ago
skywhopper | a day ago
john-tells-all | a day ago
She also publishes a number of technical topics as ZINES. I bought her "Oh Shit, Git!" zine and learned a ton of useful info, despite having decades in the industry.Zines are a great way to encourage book-allergic coworkers into learning great material.
https://wizardzines.com/
NickJLange | a day ago
Otherwise... coming soon from a vibe-coding session near you...
SleepySteve_sk | a day ago
https://joinheader.com/
We'll filter an RSS feed based on the topic and description that you provide. Feel free to reach out to me at s.kufuor@<domain> if you have any questions or feedback.
soulofmischief | a day ago
aranw | a day ago
samwho | a day ago
nsm | a day ago
agumonkey | a day ago
quite diverse, often challenging, sometimes mind bending
corbet | a day ago
iancmceachern | a day ago
jvanderbot | a day ago
georgeburdell | a day ago
wheelinsupial | a day ago
In general, though, my very limited experience working in manufacturing was that much of the blog equivalents were covered in things like white papers from hardware manufacturers or articles in trade publications. We always had a bunch of magazines delivered each month and there were usually some interesting articles to review.
UntappedShelf21 | 15 hours ago
throwaway4PP | a day ago
p2detar | a day ago
edit: typo
throwaway4PP | a day ago
zahlman | 23 hours ago
aduty | 21 hours ago
jupin | a day ago
tekno45 | a day ago
sp4nner | a day ago
metadope | 23 hours ago
Maybe, generously, in retrospect, an aspiration?
I never considered myself an actual engineer; I was (and still am) a self-taught un-credentialed computer programmer. More art than science. They made me take the title and the stock options and the business cards.
I mostly worked for and with EEs, making software tools for test automation. I was a fanboy hardware wannabee (and still am), got some on me but was never a true engineer. I learned from those who practiced their discipline; it was plain to me the reality of real engineering versus what I was doing.
I suppose in my travels I have on occasion encountered a true Software Engineer. I suppose there's reason to hope that software development will continue to mature and evolve, and eventually the other engineering disciplines will accept software as a science.
For me, it will always be a joy to make that hardware work with my twiddly bits. Not engineering, no. But very rewarding work that often resembles engineering.
CommenterPerson | 22 hours ago
To answer the OP, this Civil engineering blog / video site is really good. I always learn something new, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Well worth giving it a look:
https://practical.engineering/
mrandish | 20 hours ago
[OP] nishilpatel | 14 hours ago
but to specific is much important, imo Engineering means "Solving problem at a scale", irrelevant of the industry.
h3half | 6 hours ago
eru | 14 hours ago
Words change meaning over time and with the audience.
mitthrowaway2 | a day ago
https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/152.php
jonstewart | a day ago
Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing is also required reading for anyone that works with Windows.
https://eli.thegreenplace.net/
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
mad44 | a day ago
https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/channel/engineering-blo...
jupin | a day ago
vishnuharidas | a day ago
bodash | a day ago
A while ago I felt this "information fatigue" due to the overwhelming updates from the typical news sources (reddit, twitter, even hn).
So I built a _slow_ webdev newsfeed aggregator that doesn't overwhelm you of constant updates, so you focus on reading the actual blog contents and enjoy other things.
ewoodrich | 23 hours ago
bodash | 18 hours ago
Problem I had with the other newsfeeds is that I get distracted by the constant updates, always refresh the front-page, skipping the actual content and just skimming through headlines and comments.
So I built this one, set it as my homepage, and because it doesn't update often, I will actually read the content of the links. When I'm done, I move on to other things in life.
It's curated by matching keywords (focusing on web development) on HN, mostly automated but with few manual adjustments now and then.
Swizec | a day ago
https://scalingfastbook.com
bretthopper | a day ago
dalbaugh | 22 hours ago
ruraljuror | a day ago
rcarmo | 23 hours ago
jurakovic | 23 hours ago
https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/#blogs-general
https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/news/
iillexial | 22 hours ago
thenaturalist | 22 hours ago
1. BI Cortex - sadly seemingly not active anymore: https://bicortex.com/
2. Mark Litwintschik's Tech Blog: https://tech.marksblogg.com/
georgemcbay | 19 hours ago
The best ever is, IMO, Charles Bloom's blog, especially if you have any interest in data compression:
https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/
But it is no longer regularly updated.
primaprashant | 19 hours ago
61j3t | 17 hours ago
stack_framer | 19 hours ago
https://shopify.engineering
nothans | 15 hours ago
eru | 14 hours ago
https://www.redblobgames.com/ is not strictly speaking a blog, but an interested collection of articles on algorithmic concepts you might want to know for writing games.
vmilner | 7 hours ago
https://destevez.net/about/
from a Phd maths guy, who's worked in satellite comms, and blogs on software defined radio and comms protocols (eg error correction and radio modulation, often in space related contexts, eg decoding Voyager comms).