Given the rising popularity of people and companies writing about software engineering, I was curious to find out which blogs might be the most interesting to read. A bit of Googling led me to this list of awesome engineering blogs. With 299 contributors it seemed like a well-vetted place to start. However, as I began scrolling through the list of 600+ alphabetically sorted blogs it became apparent that, in fact, I actually had no idea where to start. Some of the blogs on this list haven't posted anything for years. So I wrote a simple Python script to check this list of domains against the Hacker News Search API and count the total amount of points that each domain has accrued over time to provide a dimension of social vetting. The results from this method turned out to be quite interesting so I've put together a post to share them.
Results
Here is the list of those top 25 software engineering blogs ordered by most points (in brackets) accrued on Hacker News for all time:
- Mozilla Hacks (13340)
- Facebook (12784)
- Stripe (10870)
- Cloudflare (9472)
- Reginald Braithwaite (8832)
- Google Online Security (8564)
- Rust (8544)
- Dan Luu (7952)
- AWS (7253)
- Google Research (6777)
- Drew DeVault (6145)
- High Scalability (6139)
- Scott Hanselman (6097)
- Go (6039)
- Armin Ronacher (5867)
- React (5467)
- Atom.io (5374)
- Evan Miller (5354)
- Matt Might (5344)
- Brendan Gregg (5040)
- Microsoft Edge (5018)
- James Hague (5010)
- Kyle Kingsbury (4917)
- Dropbox (4852)
- .NET (4841)
Okay, that's a more helpful way to sort things. But how do we know if some of these are still current? Let's take a look at blogs with the top scores for 2017 to give us a more recent indication of appreciation with a full year of data.
Top Blogs of 2017
- Dan Luu (6789)
- Google Online Security (5895)
- Mozilla Hacks (5402)
- Rust (5217)
- Google Research (4486)
- Facebook (3846)
- Drew DeVault (3171)
- Cloudflare (2701)
- React (2562)
- Brendan Gregg (2526)
- AWS (2361)
- GitHub (2349)
- Dave Cheney (2337)
- Stripe (2319)
- .NET (2168)
- Microsoft Edge (2111)
- Discord (2064)
- Matt Warren (2037)
- Coding Horror (2020)
- Raymond Chen (1952)
- Jesse Frazelle (1948)
- Kyle Kingsbury (1881)
- CockroachDB (1877)
- Chris Wellons (1796)
- Instagram (1701)
A bit of a re-ordering and a few names have been filtered out. Perhaps it might also be interesting to know what articles caused most of the interest in these blogs during this time? Let's take a look.
Top Posts of 2017
- Announcing the first SHA1 collision
- Relicensing React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js
- Entering the Quantum Era - How Firefox got fast again and where it’s going to get faster
- Firefox is on a slippery slope
- Web bloat
- Documenting the Web together
- Optimizing web servers for high throughput and low latency
- Explaining React's license
- Moving towards a more secure web
- React v16.0
- Why I Don't Talk to Google Recruiters
- Why We Terminated Daily Stormer
- The whole web at maximum FPS: How WebRender gets rid of jank
- Why Slack is inappropriate for open source communications
- Reversing the technical interview
- CockroachDB 1.0 is Production-Ready
- Saying Goodbye to Firebug
- How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5,000,000 Concurrent Users
- That time a customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator
- Keyboard latency
- Toward Go 2
- Password Rules Are Bullshit
- Uncensorable Wikipedia
- Options v. cash
- The sound of the dialup, pictured
So some of the major topics of last year were Google's proof of the first SHA1 collision, plenty of React license drama, some Firefox controversy, but ultimately Dan Luu's steady approach helped him to pip Google for the top spot for 2017.
Okay, but that list is so last year, what's happening this year? Well, if you're the type of person who likes to live life on the edge and make assumptions about the top engineering blogs for 2018 so far, then read on.
Top Blogs of 2018, so far
- Mozilla Hacks (3137)
- Cloudflare (3117)
- Stripe (2508)
- Rachel Kroll (1977)
- Julia Evans (1929)
- Rust (1513)
- Adrian Colyer (1366)
- CockroachDB (1248)
- Google Online Security 1172)
- Go (1133)
- Netflix (1059)
- Dan Luu (1051)
- Drew DeVault (1049)
- Matt Cutts (1023)
- Peteris Krumins (822)
- AWS (800)
- Zach Holman (776)
- Dropbox (776)
- Riot Games (728)
- Steve Yegge (728)
- Reginald Braithwaite (700)
- Martin Fowler (687)
- Brendan Gregg (684)
- Chris Wellons (684)
- Peter Norvig (663)
Some familiar names, a few more individuals amongst the upper ranks and Netflix has joined the party. Let's take a look at some of the highest scoring articles from these.
Top Posts of 2018, so far
- Announcing 1.1.1.1: the fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS service
- Some terrible personal news
- Ending Bitcoin support
- Making WebAssembly even faster: Firefox’s new streaming and tiering compiler
- A secure web is here to stay
- UTC is Enough for Everyone, Right?
- How I Learned to Stop Worrying and ❤️ the State Machine
- Why I usually run 'w' first when troubleshooting unknown machines
- Introducing Stripe Billing
- CPU bugs
- Sneak Peek at WebAssembly Studio
- Rust's 2018 Roadmap
- Announcing Rust 1.24
- Stripe Home
- Announcing Rust 1.26
- Incredible events at Browserling
- Rust in 2018: it's way easier to use!
- You can't Rust that
- Today we mitigated 1.1.1.1
- CSS Grid for UI Layouts
- A Proposal for Package Versioning in Go
- Working remotely, 4 years in
- Amazon Aurora Backtrack – Turn Back Time
- Hello wasm-pack!
- Open-sourcing a 10x reduction in Apache Cassandra tail latency
Okay, so a few non-software engineering anomalies in here. Stripe's position appears strongly influenced by their (usually awesome) product announcements and their decision to end support for Bitcoin. Otherwise, it appears there is still plenty of interest in Rust. But we're only just about 6 months through the year so we'll have to see what the rest of the year has in store.
Obviously, these results aren't perfect. There are most certainly many worthwhile blogs that haven't been included in the list (perhaps you'd like to add them) or haven't been upvoted sufficiently on HN. Perhaps there might be better communities or services that can be used to measure something like this. Regardless, I hope you found this somewhat insightful. If you'd like to play around with the source code you can find that here.
If you've read this far then you probably have a keen interest in software engineering articles and perhaps may be interested in Able.bio - a new platform for developers to read and write articles about software engineering. Kind of like Medium for developers, but more focused on helping you to develop your software engineering knowledge. Sign-up for an account to discover more articles about technologies you're interested in or even just check back regularly for news.
