Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?

474 pointsposted 2 months ago
by nishilpatel

Item id: 46363921

149 Comments

pella

2 months ago

> especially from tech company blogs,

https://engineering.fb.com/

https://netflixtechblog.com/

https://stripe.com/blog/engineering

https://eng.uber.com

https://engineering.linkedin.com/

https://engineering.atspotify.com/

https://tailscale.com/blog

https://careersatdoordash.com/engineering-blog/

https://dropbox.tech/

--

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 )

javcasas

a month ago

> https://engineering.fyi/

Ugh. That looks like AI this, LLM that, Agent this.

Where are the databases, the distributed systems, where is the software verification?

i_k

2 months ago

I am quite surprised and a bit disappointed that almost none of them have RSS.

But thank you!

reallydoubtful

a month ago

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

* https://careersatdoordash.com/engineering-blog/feed

* https://dropbox.tech/feed

petercooper

2 months ago

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

akutlay

a month ago

Great 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.

domysee

a month ago

This may be because most feed readers don't have a proper way to triage items. Adding a feed doesn't mean you want to read everything from said feed. Usually only a subset of articles are interesting.

I built a feed reader with that concept in mind, having a separate triage stage where you only decide if it's worth reading or not. This will make it easier to handle large feed lists and find the best articles from them.

https://lighthouseapp.io/

theshrike79

a month ago

I just build feed hydrators that get the feeds, filter them and generate a new feed for FreshRSS to consume.

For example my HN feed only surfaces articles with enough votes + comments and a few other variables.

All high-content feeds also have a maximum number of items, if it goes over they're marked as read.

phrotoma

a month ago

Your website is a work of art. Bravo <3

petercooper

a month ago

Thanks, I just treat it like my teenage bedroom, a trash heap with the occasional useful thing buried somewhere :-D

talonx

a month ago

I remember Firefox used to have this cool feature where you could detect any RSS feeds on the page you have open.

Now if I don't see it on a page I check the page source - some blogs don't advertise the feed but it's there.

spondyl

a month ago

Some of them redesign their blog layouts every 6 months, abandoning and then eventually rediscovering RSS. It's extremely annoying.

embedding-shape

2 months ago

> 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".

zbentley

a month ago

What? That makes no sense. RSS is beloved and known among engineers. Marketers? Not so much.

embedding-shape

a month ago

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 :)

zbentley

a month ago

Oh, I read your post backwards (thought you said RSS == more likely fluff). My fault, sorry!

embedding-shape

a month ago

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!

rldjbpin

a month ago

i wish the aggregators supported rss feeds.

iancmceachern

a month ago

It's so interesting to me as a Mechanical Engineer and Hardware designer/architect how on HN "Engineering" almost always means "Software engineering" here.

throwaway4PP

a month ago

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.

p2detar

a month ago

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

throwaway4PP

a month ago

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.

zahlman

a month ago

Do you not have separate "software engineering" and "computer science" undergrad streams?

aduty

a month ago

At most places, no. Lol.

nxor

a month ago

[dead]

CommenterPerson

a month ago

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:

https://practical.engineering/

talonx

a month ago

And worse - when I open Google News all the news under Technology is about the latest mobile phones and "gadgets".

jvanderbot

a month ago

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?

georgeburdell

a month ago

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.

wheelinsupial

a month ago

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.

metadope

a month ago

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.

nishilpatel

a month ago

Fair Observation, HN surrounded by mostly Software guys, which directly add nuances of "Engineering" and <Software> Engineering.

but to specific is much important, imo Engineering means "Solving problem at a scale", irrelevant of the industry.

h3half

a month ago

Perhaps. Sometimes the scale is "one" - the amount of engineering that goes into bespoke space missions is very large, and very little of that work is re-used for anything other than direct follow up missions

eru

a month ago

Well, engineer without any qualification used to refer only to combat engineers. (The term civil engineering betrays that history.)

Words change meaning over time and with the audience.

sp4nner

a month ago

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.

beechiaseed

a month ago

one of the few places I’ve found that consistently talks about hardware / manufacturing stuff is https://hardwarefyi.com, i read it pretty religiously

mrandish

a month ago

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.

aristofun

a month ago

Because it’s a computer geeks forum, what else do you expect??

tekno45

a month ago

people building physical things are probably too busy to blog about it lol

sateesh

a month ago

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.

cben

a month ago

Totally. 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/ is among the best usability/learnability dissections I've seen).

skywhopper

a month ago

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.

john-tells-all

a month ago

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.

https://wizardzines.com/

yrand

2 months ago

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.

qznc

2 months ago

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.

cess11

a month ago

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.

user

2 months ago

[deleted]

Swizec

a month ago

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.

https://scalingfastbook.com

nchmy

2 months ago

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).

ludicity

2 months ago

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.

rramadass

a month ago

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

vmilner

a month ago

I enjoy

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).

iillexial

a month ago

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.

NickJLange

a month ago

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...

SleepySteve_sk

a month ago

We're currently building something to solve this problem.

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

a month ago

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

alzamos

a month ago

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.

ruraljuror

a month ago

The book Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann covers exactly the topics you are asking about and references many blog posts.

bodash

a month ago

> 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

a month ago

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?

bodash

a month ago

Sure.

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.

georgemcbay

a month 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/

But it is no longer regularly updated.

rcarmo

a month ago

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.

snvzz

a month ago

For deeper understanding of seL4's developments and the historical context in which it appeared, Gernot Heiser's blog[0].

0. https://microkerneldude.org/

GeoAtreides

a month ago

Seems to me you're describing books.

Agingcoder

2 months ago

Cloudflare, google project zero.

vibesareoff

2 months ago

Ask the LLM you wrote this post with!

bell-cot

a month ago

OP is asking a good question. There's no dishonor if he is not fluent in English, and used an LLM to translate.

vibesareoff

a month 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˙

self_awareness

a month ago

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.

user

a month ago

[deleted]

back2reddit

a month ago

Join

date

of

an

account

means

nothing,

bro.

Gold

star

for

the

decade

of

participation

though!

loloquwowndueo

a month ago

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.

freakynit

a month ago

Add an extra line break between each list item... like this:::

1. this is first line

2. This is second

3. ...and so on

fnordlord

a month ago

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.

bell-cot

a month ago

You seem to be picking metrics for their utility in angrily excluding people who you a priori despise. :(

voxleone

a month ago

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.

user

a month ago

[deleted]

robofanatic

a month ago

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.

sieste

2 months ago

The LLM instructed him to gather training data.

ozim

2 months ago

So prompt injection on humans

sieste

2 months ago

Polluting the internet with meat slop.

themafia

a month ago

"What if we used more energy and got worse results?"

Sort of makes you miss "move fast and break things."

asupkay

a month ago

Maybe the LLM is the one asking

mitjam

2 months ago

Maybe it's just because I'm LLMing a bit too much, recently, but this question sounds to me like a prompt.

atoav

2 months ago

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.

mitjam

a month ago

Yes, 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.

x187463

a month ago

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.

mitjam

a month ago

I 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.

runlaszlorun

a month ago

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.

corbet

a month ago

I feel obligated to mention LWN - https://lwn.net/ - since that is exactly what we aspire to.

Joel_Mckay

a month ago

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

NedF

a month ago

[dead]

gethly

2 months ago

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.

nishilpatel

a month ago

That’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.