One of my favorite technology trends of the past few years has been the emergence of engineering blogs. They are, mostly, a recruiting tool, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t learn a lot about how companies operating at varying levels of maturity and scale go about their business. Here are the engineering blogs I’m following right now:
- Airbnb Nerd Blog
- Backing & Hacking (Kickstarter)
- Bitly Engineering Blog
- Code as Craft (Etsy)
- code.flickr – One of the original engineering blogs.
- The Corner – Square’s engineering blog.
- Facebook Engineering’s Notes
- Foursquare Engineering
- Google Engineering Tools
- IMVU Engineering Blog – One of earliest companies to publicize its continuous deployment process.
- Instagram Engineering
- Last.HQ – The Last.fm blog
- LinkedIn Engineering
- Paperless Post Dev Blog
- Prismatic (Added February 2, 2013)
- SlideShare Engineering Blog
- The Netflix Tech Blog
- NPR News Apps Blog
- SoundCloud Backstage
- Tumblr Engineering
- Twitter Engineering
- Viget Extend
- Wayfair Engineering
- Wealthfront Engineering
- Yammer Engineering
- Yelp Product & Engineering Blog
What sorts of things are companies publishing on engineering blogs? Here are a few examples of particularly good engineering blog posts I’ve read over the years:
- Lessons Netflix Learned from the AWS Outage is a great post-mortem on how Netflix dealt with a major outage that affected them in surprising ways.
- Building a recommendation engine, foursquare style explains the computational shortcuts you can take when you’re dealing with a lot of data.
- The Etsy Way rounds up a number of posts that explain how Etsy created its engineering culture.
- Creating an interface for geofences is a look at how Flickr built an interesting feature.
- Twitter explained how they moved to a new datacenter.
- LinkedIn’s three part series on building their iPad app was epic.
This is just a small sample of the great stuff that companies are posting to their engineering blogs these days.
If you know of any good engineering blogs that I’m missing, please post links in the comments.
Update: Added a few additional blogs suggested by @mrtazz.
Update (March 6, 2013): Added the NPR News Apps Blog.
Update (May 10, 2013): Added Kickstarter’s Backing & Hacking blog.
Apple and Microsoft. Apple obviously doesn’t blog and Microsoft just didn’t make the cut.
I said to myself – “let’s do a service to the community and prepare an OPML file of this fine list of sites.”
Alas, I haven’t found a good online OPML generator. The one I have found doesn’t parse the feeds and get their title and description.
At this point I have stopped. This is what I got. Hope it will be useful in some way.
http://info.org.il/data/engineering.xml
Oh software engineering.
If you step out of software engineering, I love the occasional link from CR4, which covers ‘engineering’ more widely:
http://cr4.globalspec.com/
This is really useful, thanks! I created a Google Reader bundle of these feeds (and you get an OPML file for free):
http://www.google.com/reader/bundle/user%2F10817992087062045496%2Fbundle%2FEngineering%20Blogs%20from%20rc3.org