Programmer’s Digest
--
If you’re a software engineer, there’s a good chance that you like to problem solve. You also probably enjoy to tinker with new technologies, understand new industry trends, evaluate tradeoffs of certain software architectures and to help others along the way.
When I started out programming as a career not too long ago, I took some time to explore and try to find ways to improve my software skills, and these sites I’ve compiled below over the years cranked my career trajectory up a notch. I hope you’ll find them equally useful, regardless of whether you’re a newbie to the field or a seasoned programming prophet. Let’s jump right in.
Hacker News (HN)
This is how I start my mornings. Covers both technical and non technical topics. It’s definitely has one of the healthier and more intellectual communities out there. I even left a comment on it here.
Dan Luu’s Blog
Dan has some pretty interesting write-ups regarding performant systems. Good technical content on lower parts of the software stack. You’ll also occasionally get non-technical posts and high level career/money advice too, which has definitely helped shape my career and work perspectives. As of this writing, my favorite has to be this on keyboard latency cause I’m a mechanical keyboard geek. :)
Julia Evans’s Blog
I love the technical content that she blogs about. The material that she covers tend to focus more on low level programming and the tools that facilitate that. Oh, and her zines are awesome!
Paul Khuong’s Blog
Another technical blog that I visit once in a while. Great material on CS concepts and topics.
The Morning Paper
A great site by Adrian Colyer that have new summaries published every weekday. I subscribe to it and have it mailed to my inbox so I can read them while having breakfast the next morning.
High Scalability
These have pretty good content on system design and technical case studies of software architectures used by some of the more renowned companies.
Magazines / Publications
It’s great that the developer community is starting to publish quality content on some technical areas
Increment by Stripe
Increment by Stripe is quarterly, “more technical” publication currently led by Susan Fowler. I like to think of it as a New Yorker for geeks / people interested in technology.
Code Words by Recurse Center
The Recurse Center based out of NYC has pretty interesting issues/write-ups on software engineering topics. They also host technical talks, and some of which are posted somewhere on YouTube.
Other Engineering Blogs
I’ve been doing a lot of machine learning readings recently. Hence, most of these tend to have some ML content in them. I visit these sites occasionally, but they’ll probably be in a HN post anyway.
OpenAI’s Blog
DeepMind’s Blog
Google Research’s Blog
Facebook Research’s Blog
Dropbox’s blog
Stripe’s blog
Netflix’s blog
Bonus: Twitter
Twitter is also another great resource for some engineering topics / chatter, but make sure you pick the right neighborhood :)
