Lesser Known Programming Blogs

These are programming blogs I think are great! I’ve chosen some to avoid overlap with other similar compilations[1-4] so hopefully there’ll be something new for everyone. There’s a few non-programming blogs at the bottom that might tangentially interest programmers too.

Ben Cox (benjojo)

Ben has the coolest homepage ever no contest. As the background, it loads an old operating system at random that you can interact with! His posts are often very hands-on with a focus on networking. Check out his post about “Tealemetry”.

ACM Queue (Association for Computing Machinery)

ACM is a huge society divided up into many SIGs (Special Interest Groups) and Queue is a publication they release online regularly. It looks like a journal but it reads closer to a blog. Most topics in Software Engineering are covered, by a range of authors.

Trivium

A monthly compilation of links posted with comments, mostly related to programming and maths. Some recent links from Trivium posts:

Muffin’s Lab

Muffin has a really beefy homelab (“production” environment you set up at home to play around with). Seeing the network diagram for his setup inspired me to get a server as a Raspberry Pi replacement and tinker around with virtualization and networking.

Zach Holman

A super opinionated blog about startups and companies and working. It’s like Joel on Software but feels more off the cuff. His latest post is pretty motivational about how much time you have to build things in the long run.

Riot Games Tech Blog

It seems like the games industry has a lot of peculiar technical challenges and this blog often goes through case studies from Riot in a good amount of detail. You can read about:

The Daily WTF

This one is well known and also not really a blog so it doesn’t really get mentioned much in round-ups. Anonymous Software Developers submit their war-stories of the crazy things they’ve seen happen at work. The feature articles are the best but there’s a post every weekday. The tale of ITAPPMONROBOT is a classic.

Jeff Knupp

Jeff is also pretty big already, but I haven’t found a better Python blog yet so it sneaks into this lesser known list. He has written some really instructive posts on how some of the mid-level features of python work, like context managers, generators and decorators.


My Favourite Non-Programming Blogs

Priceless Play

A weekly round-up of free/pay-what-you-want games, curated by Kat Brewster on Rock Paper Shotgun. It features a lot of story-focused games from game jams and indie developers. Including games like a pug dating sim!.

The Riddler

5:38’s weekly logic puzzle segment. You can get on board the Riddler Express quick puzzle, or the longer form Riddler Classic. Although it’s about maths, stats and probabilities most of the time, coding often helps with finding a solution for the riddles.


[1] http://danluu.com/programming-blogs/
[2] https://jvns.ca/blog/2014/02/13/a-few-blogs-i-really-like/
[3] https://gist.github.com/jvns/26dbe9b84694362d9fc6c6fccbd05048
[4] https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-programming-blogs