Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?
342 points by nishilpatel 15 hours ago
342 points by nishilpatel 15 hours ago
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?
Anyone specifically looking for ML engineering blogs should find this useful: https://github.com/primaprashant/ml-engineering-blogs I've found Shopify's blog interesting (and I don't happen to use Shopify or have any affiliation with them): > especially from tech company blogs, https://stripe.com/blog/engineering https://engineering.linkedin.com/ https://engineering.atspotify.com/ https://careersatdoordash.com/engineering-blog/ -- 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 am quite surprised and a bit disappointed that almost none of them have RSS. But thank you! Most of them have feeds. * 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 Not 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 Your website is a work of art. Bravo <3 Thanks, I just treat it like my teenage bedroom, a trash heap with the occasional useful thing buried somewhere :-D Some of them redesign their blog layouts every 6 months, abandoning and then eventually rediscovering RSS. It's extremely annoying. > 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". What? That makes no sense. RSS is beloved and known among engineers. Marketers? Not so much. 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 :) Oh, I read your post backwards (thought you said RSS == more likely fluff). My fault, sorry! To be fair to you, my original comment did say: > 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! It's so interesting to me as a Mechanical Engineer and Hardware designer/architect how on HN "Engineering" almost always means "Software engineering" here. 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. edit: typo 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. Do you not have separate "software engineering" and "computer science" undergrad streams? 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. 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. 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. I thought the same. Check out this mechanical engineering channel - https://youtu.be/8yUsDnBXo_g?si=CXzWV9D5OvHcCBm3 Agreed, though I understand the YC bias. I'm in biotech and mostly follow HN just to see what the software people are interested in these days. You might be more interested in books than a blog. For example: The Architecture of Open Source Applications 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. 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. 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. This 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-wha... Armin Ronacher's blog (of flask/jinja fame) https://lucumr.pocoo.org/ Antirez' blog (of Redis fame) https://antirez.com/ Simon Willison's blog (about AI) https://simonwillison.net/ Simon'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/ Encountered one specific example about a month ago here on HackerNews - All about automotive lidar.
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. 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. 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. > 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/ But it is no longer regularly updated. https://randomascii.wordpress.com/ - former Chrome engineer about all things performance engineering and particularly focused on Windows. 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). I maintain list of blogs together with "RSS reader" for personal purposes, but it's publicly available here: To balance all of the computer engineering blogs, check out this mechanical engineering channel: https://youtu.be/8yUsDnBXo_g?si=CXzWV9D5OvHcCBm3 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. 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? 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. I'm grouping most of the suggestions here into my feed summarizer at https://feeds.carmo.io - there will be an "Engineering" bulletin there soon. The book Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann covers exactly the topics you are asking about and references many blog posts. https://engineeringblogs.xyz/ is a good place listing more than 500 (and adding more) engineering blogs. 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... 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 We're currently building something to solve this problem. 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. - https://modal.com/blog/vprox
- https://modal.com/blog/host-overhead-inference-efficiency
- https://modal.com/blog/resource-solver 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. Often enjoyed article by chris wellons https://nullprogram.com/ quite diverse, often challenging, sometimes mind bending 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. It’s not a traditional blog, but Oxide’s RFDs cover exactly what you asked — implementation details and trade-offs: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/ MongoDB Engineering Blog is shaping up well https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/channel/engineering-blo... For data engineering the two best by far I know of: 1. BI Cortex - sadly seemingly not active anymore: https://bicortex.com/ 2. Mark Litwintschik's Tech Blog: https://tech.marksblogg.com/ I feel obligated to mention LWN - https://lwn.net/ - since that is exactly what we aspire to. 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. 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 Maybe it's just because I'm LLMing a bit too much, recently, but this question sounds to me like a prompt. 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. 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. 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. Ask the LLM you wrote this post with! No need to harshly judge the OP for merely using a tool. Also you wouldn’t have known some of the blogs listed here if he hadn’t asked it publicly. 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. OP is asking a good question. There's no dishonor if he is not fluent in English, and used an LLM to translate. "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˙ How do you reformat a list so it runs on separate fucking lines? Always happens to me (and I don’t use fucking LLMs) so I’d really like to know. I will always cheer on anyone who shares their curiosity. It was a great question and now I have a ton of new things on my reading list. 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. You seem to be picking metrics for their utility in angrily excluding people who you a priori despise. :( The LLM instructed him to gather training data. So prompt injection on humans Polluting the internet with meat slop. "What if we used more energy and got worse results?" Sort of makes you miss "move fast and break things." For deeper understanding of seL4's developments and the historical context in which it appeared, Gernot Heiser's blog[0]. These 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/ 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 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.
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