[HN Gopher] Discover the best developer blogs on any tech stack
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Discover the best developer blogs on any tech stack
Author : mlent
Score : 258 points
Date : 2021-01-25 15:28 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bloggingfordevs.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bloggingfordevs.com)
| playing_colours wrote:
| These days, my experience to use Google search for finding good
| sources for some high level technical question is very bad in
| general that can be summarised as going through piles of
| corporate blog posts with shallow content promoting their
| products.
|
| I would be happy to use human curated collections of links by
| topics.
| mlent wrote:
| OP here, I know what you mean.
|
| I found it similarly irritating while sourcing the data that
| all the top 10 google results recycled the same, outdated
| recommendations.
|
| Do you mean you'd like a central place to discover individual's
| curated list of blogs they read? Like blogrolls?
| nojito wrote:
| This affiliate spam in the programming community is getting
| ridiculous.
| mlent wrote:
| hey! OP here. are you talking about my site? I don't have a
| single affiliate link on my website.
|
| not sure about the sites linked, but i reject sites that are
| low quality and filled with aggressive ads!
| mariodiana wrote:
| I remember the days of Joel Spolsky, Elliot Rusty Harold, Bruce
| Eckel, et al. Who are today's luminaries?
| m_st wrote:
| I remember Joel too. Especially also the forums where you could
| get in contact with (among others) industry leaders.
|
| One of today's (tech) luminaries? For me it's Scott Hanselman.
| Always worth reading, even if you're not particularly on the
| Microsoft stack.
|
| https://www.hanselman.com/blog/
| wyck wrote:
| Anything that takes traffic away from Google is a good thing.
|
| Bring back the old school internet, forums, curated lists, niche
| communities, irc !
| pimterry wrote:
| This is great! If you're looking for other similar sites, I'd
| also suggest taking a look at https://engineeringblogs.xyz/ too.
|
| While the BFD trends site is focused on personal developer blogs
| & trending posts, that one includes high-quality engineering team
| blogs too, like Cloudflare and Google Research. It's a bit
| simpler, and focuses simply on the latest posts rather than
| trending content, but it's worth a look.
| asebold wrote:
| Nice. I've been so burnt out seeing the same type of content for
| certain topics I follow. This looks like a promising tool for
| finding fresh new info.
| mlent wrote:
| OP here, I'm glad you liked it! I definitely discovered a lot
| of interesting people blogging while sourcing the data. Hope
| you find something cool inside :)
| penguin_booze wrote:
| I was wondering if you can offer RSS feed for the stuff that ends
| up on the front page.
| DLA wrote:
| Straight up awesome work. Love this! Thank you.
| mlent wrote:
| OP here, appreciate the feedback! Hope you find something cool
| while browsing.
| lailalessdad wrote:
| https://instapage.grsm.io/lailaless8672 the best
| chovybizzass wrote:
| no new submissions in last 10 days.
| mlent wrote:
| thanks for point this out! just accepted a bunch of pending
| submissions :)
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I like the concept but the curation would have to be done
| ruthlessly by experts, otherwise you'll get the same SEO
| optimized garbage we find on google. To see Machine Learning
| Mastery at the top doesn't inspire confidence in your curation
| process. It's a blog that's emblematic to me of low quality
| content pumped out for SEO purposes.
| pc86 wrote:
| I've purchased whatever Jason calls the big bundle from ML
| Mastery and the books are pretty much the same. I get the
| impression the primary goal was "produce a lot of pages," while
| "impart information" was secondary.
|
| That being said, it looks like points are awarded two ways:
|
| * Counts the least: Retweets and likes of a tweet containing a
| link to an article on the blog
|
| * Counts the most: Replies and mentions of an article on the
| blog by other people
|
| So I'm sure it's possible to game this, and it seems to bias
| toward incumbents (but what doesn't), but at least it's trying
| to be a little better than "here's a list of blogs I like."
| sixhobbits wrote:
| Machine Learning Mastery has working code samples. That
| already puts it in the top 1% from my perspective and I
| definitely relied heavily on Jason's blog posts while doing
| my NLP masters.
|
| He definitely has a far more commercial focus than many other
| bloggers but this seems a bit too critical to me.
| pc86 wrote:
| I mean I spent hundreds of my own money on the bundle so
| it's not like I think he's a hack or fraud or anything of
| the sort. But there's a decent amount of duplicated
| content.
| kevas wrote:
| Statistics on the complexity of replies?
| stiray wrote:
| Exactly. And SEO optimized garbage is already what we get
| currently.
| mlent wrote:
| thanks for your feedback (OP here). yeah it's tough, i try to
| give anyone a chance to rank who has more than just a few
| posts.
|
| what I didn't expect about that site is that it gets shared A
| LOT on twitter. still trying to refine the algorithm :)
|
| thanks a ton for checking it out and sharing your feedback!
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| It occurs to me you could switch the curation and trend
| gathering steps to minimize the amount of work on your end.
| Instead of going "twitter trend -> filter out the bad ones
| with in-house experts" you could go "follow experts -> find
| out what trends among them". That's my usual workflow when
| using twitter.
| mlent wrote:
| that is already what i'm doing pretty much. i accept blog
| submissions and try to look for signs of quality, and then
| monitor for mentions of their sites.
|
| as you suggested though, i didn't know the ML space enough
| to know that Machine Learning Mastery publishes daily and
| has an army of people who like and retweet ANYTHING they
| publish.
|
| so it makes me wonder if i need to have some kind of
| dampening effect or how i can adapt the algorithm to handle
| that.
| zerkten wrote:
| Get some experts in the area to rank your existing
| content and suggest weightings for their recommended
| sources. This is the less from launch after launch of
| really great sites that aggregate information.
|
| Let's take Stack Overflow as an example. Jeff found a
| small group of experts and expanded it. They seeded both
| questions and answers. They didn't bring on just one or
| two experts though, they brought on enough to ensure a
| good distribution (not perfect) of viewpoints and then
| reviewed before expansion. They kept repeating this and
| didn't optimize for just one kind of developer (Django
| over Java.) All segments of developers tended to need the
| same features, but it would show up with one segment
| first. Getting answers on some topics wasn't possible
| until the product was more mature. Kill crap ruthlessly
| like SO did with downvoting and moderator-led deletion.
|
| If you are building an ML model then you are going to
| need to find a range of experts and either seed from what
| they are sharing, or create a review system. You can
| reward people with kudos on a contribution page,
| donations to open source projects or charities (even on
| behalf of a group of them), or find another way to
| motivate them. It just needs some hustle, but you've got
| to forget about purity, be open about how your model
| works, and iterate.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Perhaps there could be a ranking that takes posting frequency
| into account, and lets people decide whether they want to see
| higher- or lower-volume blogs.
|
| Perhaps not a straight ascending or descending by frequency.
| For me, the sweet spot seems to be no more than once a month.
| More if it's one that does something like a weekly post
| aggregating interesting articles from other blogs.
| mlent wrote:
| That's a cool idea! Adding an "advanced search" is
| something I've been thinking about.
|
| Gives people more control over their personal "algorithm"
| and what they value most when reading personal blogs.
|
| Hadn't thought about frequency but that could definitely be
| something you could automate based on RSS. Thanks for the
| idea!
| pc86 wrote:
| Why would you penalize a blog with 3 authors who publish 3x
| the articles of a personal blog? Why would you penalize
| higher volume at all? Trying to ascribe anything close to
| quality based on volume is like trying to grade developer
| productivity and/or skill by LOC.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I'm not asking for some strict formula, more some ability
| for people to describe what kinds of blogs they're after
| in more detail in a way that's flexible, but not overly
| fiddly to use.
|
| I'd possibly put a shared blog under a similar category
| as the ones with weekly roundups. Which is exactly why I
| threw out that example - I don't want hard-and-fast
| Google-style rules, because I would expect that to work
| out about as well as hard-and-fast Google-style rules
| ever does.
| grep_name wrote:
| He's not asking them to be penalized, just to let people
| choose what their speed is. I get the same problem on
| mastodon: there are users there whose posts I really
| appreciate and find interesting but I had to unsubscribe
| from because their posting frequency flooded out
| everything else. I just check up on their feed separately
| every once in awhile instead
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| I love this! Sometimes it's hard to find articles by individuals
| about dev topics, especially more niche topics, because it's hard
| for them to rise above Stack Overflow, Medium, etc. in search
| results. But I find that individual/independent blogs are often
| far higher quality and do a better job explaining concepts.
| mlent wrote:
| (OP) thanks for checking it out! it was definitely cool (but
| also surprisingly hard) to discover so many independent blogs
| by making this project. i'm glad you like it.
| njdullea wrote:
| I couldn't figure out how to switch from all topics to something
| else on mobile
| terribledustin wrote:
| I love the idea of adding some way to have crowd bias and not all
| mlent alone curating. Not that I think you'll be corrupt, but
| more that popular opinion is _often_ good.
| 99_00 wrote:
| I've found immediately useful information and look forward to
| digging deeper into the content. Thank you so much for this. Your
| site is exactly what's been missing for me for so long.
| mlent wrote:
| i'm glad you've found it useful! makes me super happy to hear
| :)
| ChanningAllen wrote:
| Love the concept.
|
| One slight improvement that would push me to actually bookmark a
| site like this is if, rather than merely listing _entire blogs_,
| it listed a feed of the most recent _posts_ from the various
| blogs.
|
| Posts are the level of abstraction that directly aligns with our
| reading habits. (Similar story for podcasts: give me an episode
| feed, not a podcast feed.) Twitter and other social media giants
| have cracked this code well.
| mlent wrote:
| OP here! Great point. Right now each blog just shows the #1
| trending post, but it could definitely also pull recent
| articles by RSS feed. Thanks Channing!
| pentagrama wrote:
| Let's appreciate that this project try to give visibility to
| personal self-hosted blogs (not mediums, linkedins, substacks,
| dev.tos) and is using (I guess) good old RSS tech to get the
| articles.
|
| Cheers! * opens google.com/reader and plays the 2005 Gorillaz hit
| song Feel Good Inc before going to the cinema to see V for
| Vendetta *
| mlent wrote:
| Haha thanks! (OP here) I'm using a combination of the Twitter
| API, RSS, and Puppeteer to put the data together. RSS is nice
| but not always complete, and some blogs don't have it :)
|
| Glad you enjoy it, and yes, the goal is to make it easier to
| find blogs from individuals. I don't reject sites hosted on 3rd
| party platforms, but I do encourage people to post their own
| domain name when possible.
|
| Cheers!
| nilsandrey wrote:
| I liked the idea, but I'm expecting the home page to be more like
| "https://bloggingfordevs.com/trends/" with a link or banner link
| or something to the stuff it's at home today; at least having the
| links to trends at first instead of need to moving to the bottom
| to see them. I'm afraid some colleagues didn't found out and just
| kept on the first page.
|
| You directly go to dark mode ;) it's more popular I known; I like
| to suggest a light mode; maybe you can read it from the system
| like StackOverflow.
| mlent wrote:
| OP here, thanks for the suggestion!
|
| Yeah it's kinda meant to be like its own mini site. But if you
| click the logo at the top, it does take you to the root
| homepage :)
|
| Adding a light mode is on the backlog, thanks for the
| suggestion! I need to remove a few hard-coded CSS values first
| ;)
| icameron wrote:
| I inherited some old Rails code and am updating sites recently.
| It turns out whoever wrote the code I'm working on was using
| blog-driven development. Getting a kick out of finding many old
| blog posts where the code originated from.
| Google->Ctrl+C->Ctrl-V->Repeat
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(page generated 2021-01-25 23:02 UTC)