8 ms·
Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?
I’m looking for examples of high-quality engineering blog posts—especially from tech company blogs, that go beyond surface-level explanations.
Specifically interested in posts that:
1. Explain technical concepts clearly and concisely
2. Show real implementation details, trade-offs, and failures
3. Are well-structured and readable
4. Tie engineering decisions back to business or product outcomes
Any standout blogs, posts, or platforms you regularly learn from?
- mkosmul 10mo agoAllegro Tech Blog: https://blog.allegro.tech/ https://blog.allegro.tech/
- yrand 10mo agoEncountered one specific example about a month ago here on HackerNews - All about automotive lidar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110395 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 10mo agoSounds 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.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- gchamonlive 10mo agoA very high ambition?
- cess11 10mo agoCorporations 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.
- tester756 10mo agoMaybe https://projectzero.google/archive.html https://projectzero.google/archive.html https://netflixtechblog.medium.com/ https://netflixtechblog.medium.com/ https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/engineering/ https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/engineering/
- nchmy 10mo agoYou're probably looking for something that is more focused on specific software decisions/implementations, but https://infrequently.org 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).
- tekichan 10mo agohttp://highscalability.squarespace.com/all-time-favorites/ http://highscalability.squarespace.com/all-time-favorites/
- talonx 9mo agoOh thank you! I sorely miss the original HS website.
- gethly 10mo agoThere 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.
- nishilpatel 10mo agoThat’s true. This kind of writing usually shows up as post-implementation retrospectives, so it’s inherently fragmented. 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 10mo agoCloudflare, google project zero.
- throw_await 10mo agooldnewthing
- pella 10mo ago> especially from tech company blogs, https://engineering.fb.com/ https://engineering.fb.com/ https://netflixtechblog.com/ https://netflixtechblog.com/ https://stripe.com/blog/engineering https://stripe.com/blog/engineering https://eng.uber.com https://eng.uber.com https://engineering.linkedin.com/ https://engineering.linkedin.com/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/ https://tailscale.com/blog https://tailscale.com/blog https://careersatdoordash.com/engineering-blog/ https://careersatdoordash.com/engineering-blog/ https://dropbox.tech/ https://dropbox.tech/ -- Aggregators:( https://engineering.fyi/ https://engineering.fyi/ ; https://diff.blog/ https://diff.blog/ ) + https://hn.algolia.com/?query=engineering%20blog https://hn.algolia.com/?query=engineering%20blog --- create a public engineering-blog SKILL.md. ( ~ collect the writing patterns that work on HN )
- i_k 10mo agoI am quite surprised and a bit disappointed that almost none of them have RSS. But thank you!
- petercooper 10mo agoNot RSS exactly but this OPML has feeds for several hundred such blogs if you can filter down from there: https://peterc.org/misc/engblogs.opml https://peterc.org/misc/engblogs.opml
- phrotoma 10mo agoYour website is a work of art. Bravo <3
- petercooper 10mo agoThanks, I just treat it like my teenage bedroom, a trash heap with the occasional useful thing buried somewhere :-D
- akutlay 9mo agoGreat list, thank you. The only thing to note is that whenever I imported a large list like this in the past, I always stopped checking my RSS reader after a while because the content wasn't interesting. I think finding RSS/adding it to a reader should happen organically over time.
- vogu66 10mo agonot software engineering, but https://practical.engineering/ https://practical.engineering/
- mitjam 10mo agoMaybe it's just because I'm LLMing a bit too much, recently, but this question sounds to me like a prompt.
- atoav 10mo agoHad 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.
- mitjam 9mo agoYes, fun aspect: I actually think it was written by a human but in a way as if they‘re asking a machine and not other human beings. I feel guilty of doing the same, too, from time to time I feel it‘s a bad direction.
- runlaszlorun 10mo agoI'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.
- x187463 10mo agoSome 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.
- mitjam 9mo agoI apologize if it sounded like a critique (it did), but I wanted to make an honest observation first and foremost. I think it was written by a human but it sounds Like a prompt. I believe I changed my use of language, too, but I dont like the direction for human to human communication.
- xnorswap 10mo agoYou might be more interested in books than a blog. For example: The Architecture of Open Source Applications https://aosabook.org/en/index.html https://aosabook.org/en/index.html
- pveierland 10mo agoTweag has many interesting entries with good technical depth: https://www.tweag.io/blog https://www.tweag.io/blog
- vibesareoff 10mo agoAsk the LLM you wrote this post with!
- sieste 10mo agoThe LLM instructed him to gather training data.
- bell-cot 10mo agoOP is asking a good question. There's no dishonor if he is not fluent in English, and used an LLM to translate.
- vibesareoff 10mo ago"OP" couldn't even be bothered to reformat the numbered list to run on separate fucking lines. But sure, cheer on the homogenization of online spaces into beige slop staccato bullshit! ˙ ͜ʟ˙
- bell-cot 10mo agoYou seem to be picking metrics for their utility in angrily excluding people who you a priori despise. :(
- ludicity 10mo agoI'm a huge fan of https://eblog.fly.dev/index.html 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.
- Okkef 10mo agoArmin Ronacher's blog (of flask/jinja fame) https://lucumr.pocoo.org/ https://lucumr.pocoo.org/ Antirez' blog (of Redis fame) https://antirez.com/ https://antirez.com/ Simon Willison's blog (about AI) https://simonwillison.net/ https://simonwillison.net/
- john-tells-all 10mo agoSimon's blog is stellar, and he posts on many tech topics in addition to AI. His "Today I Learned" series is an extremely useful selection of small learnings: https://til.simonwillison.net/ https://til.simonwillison.net/
- zenlot 10mo ago[dead]
- noam_k 10mo agohttps://lcamtuf.substack.com/ https://lcamtuf.substack.com/
- louiechristie 10mo agohttps://youtube.com/@modernsoftwareengineeringyt https://youtube.com/@modernsoftwareengineeringyt
- louiechristie 10mo agohttps://dora.dev/research/2025/dora-report/ https://dora.dev/research/2025/dora-report/
- bzGoRust 10mo agohttps://discord.com/blog https://discord.com/blog https://blog.cloudflare.com/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/ https://netflixtechblog.com/ https://netflixtechblog.com/
- thundergolfer 10mo ago- https://modal.com/blog/vprox https://modal.com/blog/vprox - https://modal.com/blog/host-overhead-inference-efficiency https://modal.com/blog/host-overhead-inference-efficiency - https://modal.com/blog/resource-solver https://modal.com/blog/resource-solver
- Joel_Mckay 10mo agoThese should be read at least once in your life if interested in building industrial grade electrical, mechanical, and or software. 1. https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/ https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/ 2. https://standards.nasa.gov/standard/NASA/NASA-STD-87394 https://standards.nasa.gov/standard/NASA/NASA-STD-87394 3. https://standards.nasa.gov/NASA-Technical-Standards https://standards.nasa.gov/NASA-Technical-Standards 4. https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/workmanship https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/workmanship 5. https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf 6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Developing_Safety-Critical_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev... 7. https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/laboratory-metrology/metrology-training https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/laboratory-metrology/metrology-... 8. https://www.mitutoyo.com/training-education/ 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 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=ERiXDhLHxmo ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXbzktx1KfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXbzktx1KfU Have a nice day, and note >52% of the web is LLM slop now. YMMV =3
- sevazhidkov 10mo agoIt’s not a traditional blog, but Oxide’s RFDs cover exactly what you asked — implementation details and trade-offs: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/ https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/
- nickmonad 10mo agoTigerBeetle: https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/ https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/
- avisk 10mo agohttps://technology.riotgames.com/ https://technology.riotgames.com/ https://fabiensanglard.net/ https://fabiensanglard.net/
- snvzz 10mo agoFor deeper understanding of seL4's developments and the historical context in which it appeared, Gernot Heiser's blog[0]. 0. https://microkerneldude.org/ https://microkerneldude.org/
- alzamos 10mo agoFrancesco Mazzoli’s blog on https://mazzo.li/archive.html 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.
- sdairs 10mo agohttps://clickhouse.com/blog?category=engineering https://clickhouse.com/blog?category=engineering
- GeoAtreides 10mo agoSeems to me you're describing books.
- robofanatic 10mo agohttps://www.makingsoftware.com/ https://www.makingsoftware.com/
- rramadass 10mo agoNot 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. 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 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 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-15-1330-5
- simonw 10mo agoThis post by Jay Kreps that introduced Kafka to the world remains one of my favorite pieces of engineering blog content of all time: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-what-every-software-engineer-should-know-about-real-time-datas-unifying https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha...
- sateesh 10mo agohttps://jvns.ca/ 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.
- skywhopper 10mo agoYes! 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 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.
- john-tells-all 10mo agoStrong 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. https://wizardzines.com/ https://wizardzines.com/
- cben 9mo agoTotally. She has a fearless approach to learning complex topics (my favourite quote is simply "Computers are knowable", though I couldn't find it — I think she said it on some podcast?) that doesn't shy away from acknowledging ways in which stuff is genuinely hard (e.g. https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/03/22/the-current-branch-in-git/ https://jvns.ca/blog/2024/03/22/the-current-branch-in-git/ is among the best usability/learnability dissections I've seen).
- NickJLange 10mo agoA 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...
- SleepySteve_sk 10mo agoWe're currently building something to solve this problem. https://joinheader.com/ 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 10mo agoA 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
- aranw 10mo agohttps://samwho.dev https://samwho.dev has some fantastic blog posts with great visualisations
- samwho 10mo agoThank you <3
- nsm 10mo agohttps://randomascii.wordpress.com/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/ - former Chrome engineer about all things performance engineering and particularly focused on Windows.
- agumonkey 10mo agoOften enjoyed article by chris wellons https://nullprogram.com/ https://nullprogram.com/ quite diverse, often challenging, sometimes mind bending
- corbet 10mo agoI feel obligated to mention LWN - https://lwn.net/ https://lwn.net/ - since that is exactly what we aspire to.
- iancmceachern 10mo agoIt's so interesting to me as a Mechanical Engineer and Hardware designer/architect how on HN "Engineering" almost always means "Software engineering" here.
- jvanderbot 10mo agoI 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?
- georgeburdell 10mo agoBlogs 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.
- wheelinsupial 10mo agoDepending 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.
- UntappedShelf21 10mo agoWould you consider Chris Boden the type of content you’re interested in? https://youtube.com/@physicsduck?si=WJS3UbDF0VWKwOgy https://youtube.com/@physicsduck?si=WJS3UbDF0VWKwOgy
- throwaway4PP 10mo agoIt 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.
- mitthrowaway2 10mo agoI always enjoyed Jason Sachs' blog at embedded related. https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/152.php https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/152.php
- jonstewart 10mo agoNot 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. https://eli.thegreenplace.net/ https://eli.thegreenplace.net/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
- mad44 10mo agoMongoDB Engineering Blog is shaping up well https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/channel/engineering-blog https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/channel/engineering-blo...
- jupin 10mo agoTo balance all of the computer engineering blogs, check out this mechanical engineering channel: https://youtu.be/8yUsDnBXo_g?si=CXzWV9D5OvHcCBm3 https://youtu.be/8yUsDnBXo_g?si=CXzWV9D5OvHcCBm3
- vishnuharidas 10mo agohttps://engineeringblogs.xyz/ https://engineeringblogs.xyz/ is a good place listing more than 500 (and adding more) engineering blogs.
- bodash 10mo ago> https://lessnews.dev https://lessnews.dev 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 10mo agoI 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?
- bodash 10mo agoSure. 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 10mo agoWhile 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. https://scalingfastbook.com https://scalingfastbook.com
- bretthopper 10mo agohttps://brandur.org/ https://brandur.org/
- dalbaugh 10mo agoExcellent blog
- NedF 10mo ago[dead]
- ruraljuror 10mo agoThe book Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann covers exactly the topics you are asking about and references many blog posts.
- rcarmo 10mo agoI'm grouping most of the suggestions here into my feed summarizer at https://feeds.carmo.io https://feeds.carmo.io - there will be an "Engineering" bulletin there soon.
- jurakovic 10mo agoI maintain list of blogs together with "RSS reader" for personal purposes, but it's publicly available here: https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/#blogs-general https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/#blogs-general https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/news/ https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/news/
- iillexial 10mo agoHey! Check out https://devblogs.sh 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.
- thenaturalist 10mo agoFor data engineering the two best by far I know of: 1. BI Cortex - sadly seemingly not active anymore: https://bicortex.com/ https://bicortex.com/ 2. Mark Litwintschik's Tech Blog: https://tech.marksblogg.com/ https://tech.marksblogg.com/
- georgemcbay 10mo ago> best engineering blogs with real-world depth? The best ever is, IMO, Charles Bloom's blog, especially if you have any interest in data compression: https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/ https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/ But it is no longer regularly updated.
- primaprashant 10mo agoAnyone specifically looking for ML engineering blogs should find this useful: https://github.com/primaprashant/ml-engineering-blogs https://github.com/primaprashant/ml-engineering-blogs
- 61j3t 10mo agoThanks a lot, I was literally gonna type whether anyone knows good ML blogs
- stack_framer 10mo agoI've found Shopify's blog interesting (and I don't happen to use Shopify or have any affiliation with them): https://shopify.engineering https://shopify.engineering
- nothans 10mo agoMathWorks Blogs
- eru 10mo agoJane Street has a good one at https://blog.janestreet.com/ https://blog.janestreet.com/ https://www.redblobgames.com/ 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.
- SongDeYu 10mo ago[dead]
- vmilner 10mo agoI enjoy https://destevez.net/about/ 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).
- thala 10mo ago[dead]
- chrisledet 9mo agohttps://fabiensanglard.net https://fabiensanglard.net goated
- zX41ZdbW 9mo agoHere is my list of good technology blogs: https://clickhouse.com/blog/tech-blogs https://clickhouse.com/blog/tech-blogs
- cristaloleg 9mo agoBartosz Ciechanowski - https://ciechanow.ski https://ciechanow.ski