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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 CloudFlare Code as Craft (Etsy) code.flickr - One of the original engineering blogs. The Corner (Square) Coursera Technology DocuSign Dev Blog Dropbox Tech Blog Facebook Engineering Blog (older stuff) Foursquare Engineering Google Engineering Tools IMVU Engineering Blog - One of earliest companies to publicize its continuous deployment process. Instagram Engineering Last.HQ (Last.fm) LinkedIn Engineering Lyft Making Pinterest Medium The Netflix Tech Blog NPR News Apps Blog Paperless Post Dev Blog Pinterest Several People Are Coding (Slack Engineering) SlideShare Engineering Blog SoundCloud Backstage Spotify Labs Tumblr Engineering Twitter Engineering Uber Engineering Blog Viget Extend Vine Wayfair Engineering Wealthfront Engineering Yahoo Yammer Engineering Yelp Product & Engineering Blog Zenefits 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: ...

Remember when Apple and Microsoft (along with some other companies) bought Nortel’s patent portfolio? Now they’ve formed a new company that’s in the business of extorting license fees from companies infringing on the patents that they now own. Who’s infringing? Everyone, according to the CEO of the new company formed to turn the patents into cash: Pretty much anybody out there is infringing. It would be hard for me to envision that there are high-tech companies out there that don’t use some of the patents in our portfolio. ...

The most awesome story I read yesterday was trial coverage from Oracle’s lawsuit against Google over Java and Google’s reimplementation of Java for Android. Here’s the judge explaining to Oracle’s attorney (famed litigator David Boies) why Google had no incentive to copy the code they were alleged to have copied: I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I’ve written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There’s no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You’re one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument? ...

Jeff Atwood wrote a provocative blog post entitled Please Don’t Learn to Code that I wasn’t going to respond to because it looked a lot like trolling to me. What I think, though, is that Jeff is conflating the suggestion that people learn to program with the suggestion that everyone should be a software developer. In the end, though, the post is just a mess. I’m not for falsely equating programming with essential life skills like reading, writing, and math, or with the things Jeff suggests people spend time on instead – learning how things work at a “basic level” or becoming better communicators. That said, I would encourage people to learn to program for a number of reasons. ...

Back in 2007, I wrote about “the bubble pattern,” which was a sort of not particularly insightful observation that assets that perform well generate demand that outstrips supply, which in turn leads to a massive reduction in the quality of assets in that class. Last week, Felix Salmon turned up a report from the Kauffman Foundation that documented the failings of the venture capital industry. Here’s his conclusion: The big picture, here, is that an enormous number of institutional investors are still chasing VC returns which haven’t really existed in the industry since the mid-90s. So long as all that money is chasing a relatively small number of opportunities, and especially now that valuations for early-stage tech companies are going through the roof, the chances that the average LP will make any money at all in VC are slim indeed. ...

Like a lot of people, I have gone retro when it comes to editors, using Vim for most of my day to day work. I’ve been doing most of my development these days in a terminal window, logged directly into a VM where I test my code. For more, see this article. I have been a somewhat casual vi user for at least 15 years, but using it for all my development work has made it more important to vastly improve my Vim skills in a short time. The best article on Vim I read was Yan Pritzker’s Learn to speak vim – verbs, nouns, and modifiers! It totally revolutionized the way I thought about Vim. ...

The Washington Post’s Wonkblog has a depressing story about the inability to solve a seemingly straightforward problem with technology that will resonate with anyone who works in information technology. In this case, aid agencies are trying to get people in developing nations to stop using indoor cooking fires and use stoves that are safer and more energy efficient instead. Indoor cooking fires kill around two million people a year and are horribly inefficient. They produce emissions that cause global warming. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of agencies that give away stoves and provide training to replace them, the long term effectiveness of their efforts is very low. ...

Stephen O’Grady has a piece today, Software is the New On Base Percentage, which proposes that effective use of software is no longer a way for a business to gain a competitive advantage, but rather the price of entry for being a viable market participant. It begs the question, how does a company gain a competitive advantage these days? My argument would be that the most effective approach is to recruit and retain creative people, and to free them to do their best work. I think this is the real lesson for any business in the Valve employee handbook. Yes, I’m talking about it again. ...

There’s a lesson for software developers in this paragraph: I did all my email work in that one “legacy” tab, marveling at how much I preferred it to the new-look Gmail that was the only option in any newly opened tab. I carefully “slept” the machine at night rather than shutting it down. I cancelled any software update that required a system reboot. I worried about what would happen if I unthinkingly closed the tab. It was my living connection to happier days. ...

This is the sort of thing I’d normally just tweet about, but hey, I have a blog, so I can add stuff to the permanent human knowledge base by posting it here. People are justifiably outraged that the University of Florida is eliminating its computer science department. As Alex Tabarrok notes at Marginal Revolution, this is an example of how the institutional incentives for universities are not well aligned with what society most needs from those universities. This story is complicated. The state government is cutting funding for existing institutions even as it creates an entirely new polytechnic university carved out of the University of South Florida. ...