This is more a list for myself to remember than for anyone else. I’ve tried using feed readers to keep up but that doesn’t work for me, or I forget it exists. Maybe putting them here will remind me.
Blogs and other writing
- Alexis King — Mostly functional programming stuff like Haskell.
- Amos Wenger - fasterthanli.me — blogs about Rust and other shenanigans in programming.
- Aria Beingessner - Faultlore — More Rust related posts.
- Bartosz Ciechanowski — They’ve got the very best explanation posts. It’s always quite a joy to read one. I especially enjoyed the one on the topic of mechancial watches.
- Craig Gidney - Algorithmic Assertions — This has a lot of things about quantum computing. Seem like it can be a bit math heavy, but their post about bra-ket notation helping simplify thinking about vector and matrix math was insightful. They also have a great post explaining Shor’s algorithm for factoring numbers on a quantum computer (which breaks the RSA cryptosystem at the very least).
- Dan Levy — A former coworker, they introduced me the concept of mob or swarm programming, and having seen it in action I’m sold on it. I already have some thoughts about it and I’ll try to post something soon.
- Dan Tao — One of the few on this list I know personally. Philosopher Developer is a good description I think, though I’m not sure how much they get to do the “developer” side of things these days.
- Dr. René Föhring — Seems to be fairly active in the Elixir community. I’ve found the few of their posts that I’ve read to be insightful even outside that space.
- Dylan Beattie — They are a .NET programmer but I don’t hold that against them
. They have several good NDC talks on YouTube. *Do you know about “pike matchbox”? - Erin Kissane — I just found this blog, and while there isn’t much here right now, they talk about issues around communities that seems to align with a lot of my recent thinking on the subject.
- Geoffrey Litt — They do work on exploring “malleable software: computing environments where anyone can mold their tools to their own unique needs”. They’re part of the team at Ink & Switch doing some research that I’m interested to follow.
- Graydon Hoare — The original Rustacean. I haven’t read much of their stuff, but I found their blog recently and like what I’ve read, e.g. The Rust I Wanted Had No Future
- Hidde de Vries — They write on accessibility topics related to web standards. I have a lot of interest in this area, and they’ve got good articles on these topics. *I make it a point to look over sites I work on with the Accessibility tab in Firefox devtools at the very least to spot trouble areas that need improvement.
- Jon Gjengset — Again, Rust stuff, though most of their content is in YouTube videos. Doesn’t look like they write as much.
- Julia Evans — I think I added this one because of some Nix posts they wrote.
- Leaded Solder — This one is a cool blog about retro computing and hardware shenanigans.
- No Motherships — A blog by my friend Tristan Slominski. They write about a variety of topics, mostly about distributed systems though, which is the source of the name. No Motherships refers to not having a single monolithic point of failure like the motherships in some sci-fi shows and movies, e.g. the aliens in Independence Day. It’s a shorter version of “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”.
- Pablo Meier - morepablo.com — Random thoughts on lots of topics. The ones on programming language choice *Just one example with links to others, Where have all the hackers gone?. and company culture are thought provoking. Fighting over frameworks is a good one especially with respect to following what everyone else is doing without much question.
- Simon Willison — I’ve bumped into this blog multiple times in the past year without digging deeper. It has lots of content on LLMs, the problems they have, and uses for them. Lots of good stuff if you haven’t started looking into these things yet.
- Tanya Reilly - No Idea Blog — I just found this blog, mostly through their book The Staff Engineer’s Path which jumped to the top of my reading list.
- The Erlangelist — This is the blog of Saša Jurić, who wrote the book Elixir in Action and has several talks about using Erlang and Elixir in production systems. His talks on The Soul of Erlang and Elixir and Clarity are worth watching.
- Xe Iaso — I mostly read their posts about Nix. But there’s a lot there, and they seem to be a pretty prolific writer.
- Tales From The Dork Web — this was a Substack by someone named Steve Lord. I don’t know what happened to it, but it disappeared around March 2023. I went through the Internet Archive to collect a list of links to the posts that existed and put them on this page. I think some of them are worth a read.
YouTube and other video content
- 3Blue1Brown - Grant Sanderson — Grant’s channel is full of interesting videos about math. I appreciate their visual approach, especially when it comes to complex topics I struggled with in college, e.g. eigenvectors and eigenvalues in linear algebra.
- Dr. Geoff Lindsey — Their YouTube channel is full of interesting videos about English phonology and phonetics.
- Dylan Beattie — I linked to their blog above, but they have a lot of NDC talks on YouTube. They doesn’t have a channel though, so this is a link to a search of their name.
- Paul Sellers - Woodworking Masterclasses — I’ve been following Paul for years now. Their gentle instructions in hand-tool woodworking have been great at guiding me through my first forays into woodworking. They also have some free content on YouTube.
Podcasts and audio content
- Aria Code — A podcast from the Metropolitan Opera in New York where each episode they discuss a single aria and usually have interesting interviews with people telling stories that are somehow related to the aria, even if they seem completely unrelated. The episode for Nessun Dorma is one of my favorites even if it is a bit sad at points.
- Story Behind the Story — My friend Clara’s podcast where they “interview authors about their creative process, from inspiration behind the books they write to specific choices they make.”