radhika's dev thoughts

Developer Blogs & Newsletters I Read

This is a list of the current developer blogs, email newsletters, and YouTube channels I am subscribed to, along with some notes on whether or not they will be useful for you to follow.

The Pragmatic Engineer #

Gergely is the best at telling software engineers everything they need to know about the state of the industry without the hype. I've been reading his work since he was just blogging, and have now been reading his newsletter for a couple of years. The emphasis really is on a pragmatic point of view: real, relevant news, analyses, and insider interviews. This is particularly mostly relevant if you work in the "tech" industry, not as an engineer in another industry.

Bytes.dev #

This is JavaScript-specific news that doesn't make me want to tear my hair out. A lot of the main focus is on trends, which is pretty irrelevant unless you're working for a startup and are choosing new technologies every day. However, they have a section that's called "Spot the Bug" which is a good reminder of obscure language rules, and their curation of external blog posts worth reading is a good enough mix of trends and non-trends to justify skimming twice a week.

Tech Talks Weekly #

This is a recent and powerful discovery for me. I fundamentally believe that if you're hot a hobbyist professional and you want to keep learning, your options start to get slim very fast. You can read a couple of books a year, but I generally focus on more fundamentals and timeless books there. To keep up with a diverse set of ideas and technologies without getting bogged down in blog spam (popularity isn't a good curation metric!), tech talks are my new go-to. I try and watch anything that sounds interesting to me and shut it off in 10 minutes if it's not useful. This means, more often than not, watching talks outside of the world of JavaScript and front-end development.

Software Clown by Itamar Turner-Trauring #

The shortest, sweetest newsletter I get each week. Software Clown is an extraordinary series even though I've never touched Python in my life, and Itamar's books and blog posts are concise and actionable. I highly recommend this one to basically every professional software engineer. There's no encouragement to become a hobbyist who's into trends here.

Will Larson #

Will is mostly a skip for me these days as his focus has shifted almost entirely towards writing for Staff+ Engineers and tech executives. However, I will still read just about anything that isn't specifically about those topics from him. He has written some of the most all-time engineering career posts ever, so digging through his archives is more recommended than subscribing at this point.