6 ms·

Ask HN: Which companies' tech blogs do you read?

27 points by ggregoire 9y ago

DamonHD 9y ago
CloudFlare occasionally: it is consistently interesting.
git-pull 9y ago
Quick link of post mortem blogposts: https://gist.github.com/cheapRoc/d9e73fe05480330c1e36410cbdf0e867 https://gist.github.com/cheapRoc/d9e73fe05480330c1e36410cbdf... The best company blogs I see are ones that have their own open source projects. Like Facebook. Where they break off a generally usable piece of their codebase into a library. Nothing beats a nice version release with an update on all the features and improvements it brings. https://reactjs.org/blog/2014/02/20/react-v0.9.html https://reactjs.org/blog/2014/02/20/react-v0.9.html So I consider open source subsidiaries as "company tech blogs". Let's try to keep things purely to blogs: https://stripe.com/blog/engineering https://stripe.com/blog/engineering Favorite post was their post mortem: https://web.archive.org/web/20160126093909/https://support.stripe.com/questions/outage-postmortem-2015-10-08-utc https://web.archive.org/web/20160126093909/https://support.s... This was Stripe's 2015 outage with the database index change (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10365798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10365798) I presumed it was an index involving customer ID, but it wasn't specific.
ianleeclark 9y ago
In total I follow around 130 different RSS feeds (just for tech blogs). These range for esoteric scheme blogs to Netflix, Uber, Facebook Engineering. It came to a point where I had a really hard time prioritizing everything, so I implemented a fairly naive algorithm to rank them. I found the most interesting stuff was coming from FAANG, so I would give their engineering blog posts a few extra points (multiply by 2). I really like Julia Evans and always learn something from them, so her blog is currently a multiple of 5 for me (the highest). I have been toying around with making this aggregation a weekly newsletter, but currently it's just a landing page and an Elixir/Phoenix app (what I use to keep track of my RSS feeds). If anyone's interested: https://unicorndigest.com https://unicorndigest.com
- O_H_E 9y ago
  Because I have not settled yet, what feed/RSS reader do you use
  - sankha93 9y ago
    I tried multiple feed readers but didn't find anything satisfying or simple enough. These days I use a Python script that runs as a daily cron and sends me a plain text email of new posts from the sites to which I have subscribed.
  - ianleeclark 9y ago
    A custom Elixir/Phoenix application I wrote. I'd recommend Feedly for anyone who has a small amount of feeds they follow (I think I have over 200 different sources at the moment), but I need custom ordering that Feedly doesn't offer which is why I wrote my own.
    - O_H_E 9y ago
      Would you mind sharing, I didn't find it in your github. I was thinking about Elixir recently anyway ;)
- tmaly 9y ago
  How much manual review do you have to do to keep this going?
AlexAmee 9y ago
None except I want to buy their stock. Lately: https://jobs.zalando.com/tech/blog/ https://jobs.zalando.com/tech/blog/
firegrind 9y ago
Etsy
stephenr 9y ago
Persona's (MySQL/DB related) occasionally.
vladholubiev 9y ago
I don't necessarily read all of them, but ICYMI there is a curated list of engineering blogs - https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs
indogooner 9y ago
Depends on my interests at the time but I prefer the blogs where the tech is open source so mostly Twitter[1] and LinkedIn[2] for me. I also follow Airbnb[3] primarily for their blogs on Data and ML (the area in which I work). Have occasionally looked at Uber and Netflix for some of the posts related to Big Data and ML. [1] https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us.html https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us.html [2] https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog [3] https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering

27 points by ggregoire 9y ago

CloudFlare occasionally: it is consistently interesting.

Quick link of post mortem blogposts: https://gist.github.com/cheapRoc/d9e73fe05480330c1e36410cbdf0e867 https://gist.github.com/cheapRoc/d9e73fe05480330c1e36410cbdf... The best company blogs I see are ones that have their own open source projects. Like Facebook. Where they break off a generally usable piece of their codebase into a library. Nothing beats a nice version release with an update on all the features and improvements it brings. https://reactjs.org/blog/2014/02/20/react-v0.9.html https://reactjs.org/blog/2014/02/20/react-v0.9.html So I consider open source subsidiaries as "company tech blogs". Let's try to keep things purely to blogs: https://stripe.com/blog/engineering https://stripe.com/blog/engineering Favorite post was their post mortem: https://web.archive.org/web/20160126093909/https://support.stripe.com/questions/outage-postmortem-2015-10-08-utc https://web.archive.org/web/20160126093909/https://support.s... This was Stripe's 2015 outage with the database index change (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10365798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10365798) I presumed it was an index involving customer ID, but it wasn't specific.

ianleeclark 9y ago

In total I follow around 130 different RSS feeds (just for tech blogs). These range for esoteric scheme blogs to Netflix, Uber, Facebook Engineering. It came to a point where I had a really hard time prioritizing everything, so I implemented a fairly naive algorithm to rank them. I found the most interesting stuff was coming from FAANG, so I would give their engineering blog posts a few extra points (multiply by 2). I really like Julia Evans and always learn something from them, so her blog is currently a multiple of 5 for me (the highest). I have been toying around with making this aggregation a weekly newsletter, but currently it's just a landing page and an Elixir/Phoenix app (what I use to keep track of my RSS feeds). If anyone's interested: https://unicorndigest.com https://unicorndigest.com

O_H_E 9y ago
Because I have not settled yet, what feed/RSS reader do you use
- sankha93 9y ago
  I tried multiple feed readers but didn't find anything satisfying or simple enough. These days I use a Python script that runs as a daily cron and sends me a plain text email of new posts from the sites to which I have subscribed.
- ianleeclark 9y ago
  A custom Elixir/Phoenix application I wrote. I'd recommend Feedly for anyone who has a small amount of feeds they follow (I think I have over 200 different sources at the moment), but I need custom ordering that Feedly doesn't offer which is why I wrote my own.
  - O_H_E 9y ago
    Would you mind sharing, I didn't find it in your github. I was thinking about Elixir recently anyway ;)
tmaly 9y ago
How much manual review do you have to do to keep this going?

AlexAmee 9y ago

None except I want to buy their stock. Lately: https://jobs.zalando.com/tech/blog/ https://jobs.zalando.com/tech/blog/

firegrind 9y ago

Etsy

stephenr 9y ago

Persona's (MySQL/DB related) occasionally.

vladholubiev 9y ago

I don't necessarily read all of them, but ICYMI there is a curated list of engineering blogs - https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs

indogooner 9y ago

Depends on my interests at the time but I prefer the blogs where the tech is open source so mostly Twitter[1] and LinkedIn[2] for me. I also follow Airbnb[3] primarily for their blogs on Data and ML (the area in which I work). Have occasionally looked at Uber and Netflix for some of the posts related to Big Data and ML. [1] https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us.html https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us.html [2] https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog [3] https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering