[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with rea...
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Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?
I'm looking for examples of high-quality engineering blog posts--
especially from tech company blogs, that go beyond surface-level
explanations. Specifically interested in posts that: 1. Explain
technical concepts clearly and concisely 2. Show real
implementation details, trade-offs, and failures 3. Are well-
structured and readable 4. Tie engineering decisions back to
business or product outcomes Any standout blogs, posts, or
platforms you regularly learn from?
Author : nishilpatel
Score : 333 points
Date : 2025-12-23 09:50 UTC (13 hours ago)
| yrand wrote:
| Encountered one specific example about a month ago here on
| HackerNews - All about automotive lidar.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110395
|
| Blog posts where I find quality really shows are usually about
| something I know next to nothing about how it works. A badly
| written article usually either goes really shallow or skips some
| facts when going into depth and requires catchup elsewhere to
| actually understand it. The lidar article from Main Street
| Autonomy goes beyond basics and explained everything from the
| ground up in such a connected way that it was a real pleasure
| reading it.
| qznc wrote:
| Sounds like you look for an intersection of academic papers (1.),
| tech blogs (2.), text books (3.), and confidential business
| strategies (4.)? A very high ambition.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| A very high ambition?
| cess11 wrote:
| Corporations commonly describe some of their internal processes
| and achievements because it builds reputation and that can be
| important for both sales and recruitment.
|
| Sometimes they do it in the form of free or open source
| software releases.
| tester756 wrote:
| Maybe
|
| https://projectzero.google/archive.html
|
| https://netflixtechblog.medium.com/
|
| https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/engineering/
| nchmy wrote:
| You're probably looking for something that is more focused on
| specific software decisions/implementations, but
| https://infrequently.org is the best web development blog out
| there.
|
| It's not "technical" so much as it just educates you on how to be
| a good web developer/run a team. There's zero fluff and
| considerable detail (footnotes are practically blog posts
| themselves).
| tekichan wrote:
| http://highscalability.squarespace.com/all-time-favorites/
| gethly wrote:
| There are no such blogs. Usually companies, or individuals, will
| write these after they implement some feature into their
| products. Which makes them inherently little pieces of
| information scattered all over the internet and there is no one
| blog that is just about this.
| Agingcoder wrote:
| Cloudflare, google project zero.
| throw_await wrote:
| oldnewthing
| pella wrote:
| > especially from tech company blogs,
|
| https://engineering.fb.com/
|
| https://netflixtechblog.com/
|
| https://stripe.com/blog/engineering
|
| https://eng.uber.com
|
| https://engineering.linkedin.com/
|
| https://engineering.atspotify.com/
|
| https://tailscale.com/blog
|
| https://careersatdoordash.com/engineering-blog/
|
| https://dropbox.tech/
|
| --
|
| Aggregators:( https://engineering.fyi/ ; https://diff.blog/ )
|
| + https://hn.algolia.com/?query=engineering%20blog
|
| ---
|
| create a public engineering-blog SKILL.md. ( ~ collect the
| writing patterns that work on HN )
| i_k wrote:
| I am quite surprised and a bit disappointed that almost none of
| them have RSS.
|
| But thank you!
| petercooper wrote:
| Not RSS exactly but this OPML has feeds for several hundred
| such blogs if you can filter down from there:
| https://peterc.org/misc/engblogs.opml
| phrotoma wrote:
| Your website is a work of art. Bravo <3
| petercooper wrote:
| Thanks, I just treat it like my teenage bedroom, a trash
| heap with the occasional useful thing buried somewhere
| :-D
| onion2k wrote:
| Spotify and Tailscale do...
|
| https://engineering.atspotify.com/feed
|
| https://tailscale.com/blog/index.xml
| embedding-shape wrote:
| > I am quite surprised and a bit disappointed that almost
| none of them have RSS.
|
| I think it's on purpose. It is to signal that these (those
| without RSS) aren't really "engineering" blogs at all,
| they're marketing websites aimed to help with recruiting and
| making the organization seem "engineering-like".
| zbentley wrote:
| What? That makes no sense. RSS is beloved and known among
| engineers. Marketers? Not so much.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Exactly, so if the blog doesn't have RSS, you know
| they're probably made from marketers with no input from
| engineering, otherwise they'd have RSS on the blogs.
|
| Edit: Ah, noticed I made a without/with typo, fixed that,
| should make about 2% more sense now for the ones who the
| original meaning was unclear :)
| zbentley wrote:
| Oh, I read your post backwards (thought you said RSS ==
| more likely fluff). My fault, sorry!
| embedding-shape wrote:
| To be fair to you, my original comment did say:
|
| > It is to signal that these (those with RSS) aren't
| really "engineering" blogs at all
|
| So now when I corrected that with/without typo, it looks
| like your previous comment doesn't make sense, but it
| kind of did, at the time. Sorry about that and thanks for
| making me realize the typo!
| reallydoubtful wrote:
| Most of them have feeds.
|
| * https://engineering.fb.com/feed
|
| * https://netflixtechblog.com/feed
|
| * No feed for stripe
|
| * https://www.uber.com/en-GB/blog/london/engineering/rss/
|
| * No feed for LinkedIn
|
| * https://engineering.atspotify.com/feed
|
| * https://tailscale.com/blog/index.xml
|
| * https://careersatdoordash.com/engineering-blog/feed
|
| * https://dropbox.tech/feed
| omgitspavel wrote:
| there is a feed for stripe:
| https://stripe.com/blog/feed.rss
| KomoD wrote:
| linkedin feed: https://www.linkedin.com/blog.rss
| spondyl wrote:
| Some of them redesign their blog layouts every 6 months,
| abandoning and then eventually rediscovering RSS. It's
| extremely annoying.
| vogu66 wrote:
| not software engineering, but https://practical.engineering/
| mitjam wrote:
| Maybe it's just because I'm LLMing a bit too much, recently, but
| this question sounds to me like a prompt.
| atoav wrote:
| Had the same thought. ChatGPT often tells me things like: "This
| is the hard truth" or "I am telling it to you as it is (no
| fluff)" or whatever. Just because my initial prompt contains a
| line about it not making things up and telling me how things
| are instead of what would please me to hear. I added a line to
| specifically tell it to not phrase out these things, but it
| appears to be surprisingly hard to get rid of those phrases.
| runlaszlorun wrote:
| I'm not beating up on OP but I chuckled when I read the
| question. Literally the only place I see the phrase "no fluff"
| with any frequency is with Deepseek lol.
|
| Nothing wrong with the phrase itself of course, other than the
| fact that it's like literally in every other reply for me lol.
| x187463 wrote:
| Some people act like the use of an LLM immediately invalidates
| or lowers the value of a piece of content. But the case of a
| question or simple post, especially by somebody for whom
| English is second language, using an LLM to rephrase or clean-
| up some text seems like an innocent and practical use case for
| LLMs.
| xnorswap wrote:
| You might be more interested in books than a blog.
|
| For example: The Architecture of Open Source Applications
|
| https://aosabook.org/en/index.html
| alhirzel wrote:
| Such a great resource!
| leoh wrote:
| Absolutely fantastic, thank you!
| pveierland wrote:
| Tweag has many interesting entries with good technical depth:
|
| https://www.tweag.io/blog
| vibesareoff wrote:
| Ask the LLM you wrote this post with!
| sieste wrote:
| The LLM instructed him to gather training data.
| ozim wrote:
| So prompt injection on humans
| sieste wrote:
| Polluting the internet with meat slop.
| themafia wrote:
| "What if we used more energy and got worse results?"
|
| Sort of makes you miss "move fast and break things."
| bell-cot wrote:
| OP is asking a good question. There's no dishonor if he is not
| fluent in English, and used an LLM to translate.
| vibesareoff wrote:
| "OP" couldn't even be bothered to reformat the numbered list
| to run on separate fucking lines.
|
| But sure, cheer on the homogenization of online spaces into
| beige slop staccato bullshit!
|
| . [?]L.
| bell-cot wrote:
| You seem to be picking metrics for their utility in angrily
| excluding people who you _a priori_ despise. :(
| fnordlord wrote:
| I will always cheer on anyone who shares their curiosity.
|
| It was a great question and now I have a ton of new things
| on my reading list.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| How do you reformat a list so it runs on separate fucking
| lines?
|
| Always happens to me (and I don't use fucking LLMs) so I'd
| really like to know.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Other sites beckon.
| self_awareness wrote:
| You seem to be new here, so you probably don't know that:
|
| - Even if you separate each point with a new line, - HN
| formatter will join everything to one line anyway. - So
| it's not OP's fault his points are in the same line,
| because the source post has them in separate lines.
| asupkay wrote:
| Maybe the LLM is the one asking
| voxleone wrote:
| No judgement here whatsoever, but i think LLM would be "the"
| tool for this job. I also wonder if there's any point to "Ask"
| sections in websites after LLM's.
| robofanatic wrote:
| No need to harshly judge the OP for merely using a tool. Also
| you wouldn't have known some of the blogs listed here if he
| hadn't asked it publicly.
| ludicity wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of https://eblog.fly.dev/index.html. The author,
| Efron, very graciously advises me on a lot of little things
| around my engineering practice, and I've learned a huge amount
| about weird holes in my practice from industry dysfunction in a
| very short period of time from him.
| Okkef wrote:
| Armin Ronacher's blog (of flask/jinja fame)
| https://lucumr.pocoo.org/
|
| Antirez' blog (of Redis fame) https://antirez.com/
|
| Simon Willison's blog (about AI) https://simonwillison.net/
| john-tells-all wrote:
| Simon's blog is stellar, and he posts on many tech topics in
| addition to AI.
|
| His "Today I Learned" series is an extremely useful selection
| of small learnings: https://til.simonwillison.net/
| noam_k wrote:
| https://lcamtuf.substack.com/
| louiechristie wrote:
| https://youtube.com/@modernsoftwareengineeringyt
| louiechristie wrote:
| https://dora.dev/research/2025/dora-report/
| bzGoRust wrote:
| https://discord.com/blog https://blog.cloudflare.com/
| https://netflixtechblog.com/
| thundergolfer wrote:
| - https://modal.com/blog/vprox - https://modal.com/blog/host-
| overhead-inference-efficiency - https://modal.com/blog/resource-
| solver
| mkosmul wrote:
| Allegro Tech Blog: https://blog.allegro.tech/
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| These should be read at least once in your life if interested in
| building industrial grade electrical, mechanical, and or
| software.
|
| 1. https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/
|
| 2. https://standards.nasa.gov/standard/NASA/NASA-STD-87394
|
| 3. https://standards.nasa.gov/NASA-Technical-Standards
|
| 4. https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/workmanship
|
| 5. https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf
|
| 6.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...
|
| 7. https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/laboratory-
| metrology/metrology-...
|
| 8. https://www.mitutoyo.com/training-education/
|
| 9. "Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of
| crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852,
| https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm )
|
| The artifacts are usually beautiful from good Workmanship
| Standards, Design For Manufacturability, and systematic
| Metrology. Dragging us all into the future one project at a time.
|
| Note that training an ML model with such data would be pointless,
| as statistical saliency forms a paradox with consumer product
| design compromises. Note, there are _always_ tradeoffs in every
| problem domain.
|
| 'What it actually means to be "AI Generated"' (
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERiXDhLHxmo )
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXbzktx1KfU
|
| Have a nice day, and note >52% of the web is LLM slop now. YMMV
| =3
| sevazhidkov wrote:
| It's not a traditional blog, but Oxide's RFDs cover exactly what
| you asked -- implementation details and trade-offs:
| https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/
| nickmonad wrote:
| TigerBeetle: https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/
| avisk wrote:
| https://technology.riotgames.com/ https://fabiensanglard.net/
| snvzz wrote:
| For deeper understanding of seL4's developments and the
| historical context in which it appeared, Gernot Heiser's blog[0].
|
| 0. https://microkerneldude.org/
| alzamos wrote:
| Francesco Mazzoli's blog on https://mazzo.li/archive.html. His
| blog has topped HN a few times with various low-level/linux
| topics, some deep dives into algorithms etc.
| sdairs wrote:
| https://clickhouse.com/blog?category=engineering
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| Seems to me you're describing books.
| robofanatic wrote:
| https://www.makingsoftware.com/
| rramadass wrote:
| Not a blog, but books detailing real-world experiences from
| Indian Engineers/Scientists/Researchers; Quite inspiring to see
| how people strive unceasingly towards a goal in spite of all the
| limitations and hurdles (viz. Political/Financial/Material etc.)
| imposed on them.
|
| There is much to learn, in these books.
|
| _The Mind of an Engineer by Purnendu Ghosh et al._ -
| https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-10-0119-2
|
| _The Mind of an Engineer: Volume 2 by Purnendu Ghosh et al._ -
| https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-15-1330-5
| simonw wrote:
| This post by Jay Kreps that introduced Kafka to the world remains
| one of my favorite pieces of engineering blog content of all
| time: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-
| wha...
| sateesh wrote:
| https://jvns.ca/ Not a tech. company blog. Explains technical
| concepts clearly and top notch technical posts. Fits 1,2, 3
| criteria of what you ask, though not the 4th one.
| skywhopper wrote:
| Yes! Julia is fantastic at explaining concepts, and creating
| ways to learn about them. She produces a great series of
| "zines" summarizing a bunch of technical topics, her blog
| archives are really fascinating, and she's created really
| useful tools like Mess With DNS (https://messwithdns.net) which
| gives you your own DNS subdomain and the means to update
| records so you can try things out in an easy, harmless way.
| john-tells-all wrote:
| Strong recommend! Julia's posts are always really engaging and
| educational.
|
| She also publishes a number of technical topics as ZINES. I
| bought her "Oh Shit, Git!" zine and learned a ton of useful
| info, despite having decades in the industry.Zines are a great
| way to encourage book-allergic coworkers into learning great
| material.
|
| https://wizardzines.com/
| NickJLange wrote:
| A lot of great links here to the firehose (or at least for
| working parents). Unless someone has built it - anything that
| aggregates and shows beyond the first click of the by-line. (i.e.
| a first paragraph, or LLM-summary of the content)?
|
| Otherwise... coming soon from a vibe-coding session near you...
| SleepySteve_sk wrote:
| We're currently building something to solve this problem.
|
| https://joinheader.com/
|
| We'll filter an RSS feed based on the topic and description
| that you provide. Feel free to reach out to me at
| s.kufuor@<domain> if you have any questions or feedback.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| A friend and I worked on a startup together that did this back
| when only the GPT-3 API was available. Sucked up everything we
| could think of, including HN and traditionally opaque sources
| such as Telegram
| aranw wrote:
| https://samwho.dev has some fantastic blog posts with great
| visualisations
| samwho wrote:
| Thank you <3
| nsm wrote:
| https://randomascii.wordpress.com/ - former Chrome engineer about
| all things performance engineering and particularly focused on
| Windows.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Often enjoyed article by chris wellons https://nullprogram.com/
|
| quite diverse, often challenging, sometimes mind bending
| corbet wrote:
| I feel obligated to mention LWN - https://lwn.net/ - since that
| is exactly what we aspire to.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| It's so interesting to me as a Mechanical Engineer and Hardware
| designer/architect how on HN "Engineering" almost always means
| "Software engineering" here.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I would love more blogs on mechanical, hardware, and especially
| industrial engineering, but the demographics in those areas
| skew stereo-typically older and also likely less blog-oriented,
| right?
| georgeburdell wrote:
| Blogs are almost 30 years old at this point, but yes, I do
| associate a nearly compulsive need to show off one's work in
| meticulously-crafted blog posts with younger people.
| wheelinsupial wrote:
| Depending on what you're looking for in industrial
| engineering, there are a lot of blogs on lean manufacturing
| and the Toyota Production System. INFORMS, may be paywalled,
| also publishes a lot of pretty interesting articles on
| applications of operations research to industry.
|
| In general, though, my very limited experience working in
| manufacturing was that much of the blog equivalents were
| covered in things like white papers from hardware
| manufacturers or articles in trade publications. We always
| had a bunch of magazines delivered each month and there were
| usually some interesting articles to review.
| throwaway4PP wrote:
| It is funny, almost as funny as an entire cadre of people with
| "engineer" in their title who've never had to draw a free body
| diagram, learn circuit analysis, understand the basics of
| thermodynamics, or the mechanics of materials.
| p2detar wrote:
| I hold a CS master degree from an Eastern European university
| and everything you listed was in our Bachelor degree program.
| It's pretty funny because while studying material properties
| back then I always wondered how and when am I gonna use that.
| It kind of makes sense now that I think about it - some
| students preferred branching out to hardware.
|
| edit: typo
| throwaway4PP wrote:
| That's great, unfortunately it is quite rare for CS
| undergrad programs in the US to require the basic
| engineering and science classes the other
| engineering/science majors require.
| zahlman wrote:
| Do you not have separate "software engineering" and
| "computer science" undergrad streams?
| aduty wrote:
| At most places, no. Lol.
| jupin wrote:
| I thought the same. Check out this mechanical engineering
| channel - https://youtu.be/8yUsDnBXo_g?si=CXzWV9D5OvHcCBm3
| tekno45 wrote:
| people building physical things are probably too busy to blog
| about it lol
| sp4nner wrote:
| Agreed, though I understand the YC bias. I'm in biotech and
| mostly follow HN just to see what the software people are
| interested in these days.
| metadope wrote:
| I remember feeling sheepish when I was hired to a position
| titled 'Software Engineer'. To me, those two words together
| seemed incongruent. Not quite an oxymoron but certainly a
| puzzlement.
|
| Maybe, generously, in retrospect, an aspiration?
|
| I never considered myself an actual engineer; I was (and still
| am) a self-taught un-credentialed computer programmer. More art
| than science. They made me take the title and the stock options
| and the business cards.
|
| I mostly worked for and with EEs, making software tools for
| test automation. I was a fanboy hardware wannabee (and still
| am), got some on me but was never a true engineer. I learned
| from those who practiced their discipline; it was plain to me
| the reality of real engineering versus what I was doing.
|
| I suppose in my travels I have on occasion encountered a true
| Software Engineer. I suppose there's reason to hope that
| software development will continue to mature and evolve, and
| eventually the other engineering disciplines will accept
| software as a science.
|
| For me, it will always be a joy to make that hardware work with
| my twiddly bits. Not engineering, no. But very rewarding work
| that often resembles engineering.
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| Hear hear. The word "Technology" has also been redefined to
| mean computer or phone stuff. As a real (manly) engineer, this
| pisses me off no end! :-)
|
| To answer the OP, this Civil engineering blog / video site is
| really good. I always learn something new, and his enthusiasm
| is infectious. Well worth giving it a look:
|
| https://practical.engineering/
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| I always enjoyed Jason Sachs' blog at embedded related.
|
| https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/152.php
| jonstewart wrote:
| Not corporate, but two of the best individual developer blogs are
| Eli Bendersky's and Rachel by the Bay. They've both been blogging
| prolifically for a decade+, Eli with a focus on, broadly,
| compilers and Rachel on SRE/debugging.
|
| Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing is also required reading for
| anyone that works with Windows.
|
| https://eli.thegreenplace.net/
|
| https://rachelbythebay.com/w/
|
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/
| mad44 wrote:
| MongoDB Engineering Blog is shaping up well
|
| https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/channel/engineering-blo...
| jupin wrote:
| To balance all of the computer engineering blogs, check out this
| mechanical engineering channel:
| https://youtu.be/8yUsDnBXo_g?si=CXzWV9D5OvHcCBm3
| vishnuharidas wrote:
| https://engineeringblogs.xyz/ is a good place listing more than
| 500 (and adding more) engineering blogs.
| bodash wrote:
| > https://lessnews.dev
|
| A while ago I felt this "information fatigue" due to the
| overwhelming updates from the typical news sources (reddit,
| twitter, even hn).
|
| So I built a _slow_ webdev newsfeed aggregator that doesn't
| overwhelm you of constant updates, so you focus on reading the
| actual blog contents and enjoy other things.
| ewoodrich wrote:
| I bookmarked to take a closer look later, but I'm a little
| unclear on the premise, could you explain what you mean by
| "slow"/how it is filtered/curated?
| Swizec wrote:
| While not exactly a blog, I've collected ~16 years of [startup]
| engineering lessons into a book and I think it came out
| fantastic. People are saying super nice things.
|
| https://scalingfastbook.com
| bretthopper wrote:
| https://brandur.org/
| dalbaugh wrote:
| Excellent blog
| ruraljuror wrote:
| The book _Designing Data-Intensive Applications_ by Martin
| Kleppmann covers exactly the topics you are asking about and
| references many blog posts.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I'm grouping most of the suggestions here into my feed summarizer
| at https://feeds.carmo.io - there will be an "Engineering"
| bulletin there soon.
| jurakovic wrote:
| I maintain list of blogs together with "RSS reader" for personal
| purposes, but it's publicly available here:
|
| https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/#blogs-general
|
| https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/news/
| iillexial wrote:
| Hey! Check out https://devblogs.sh. It's a curated library with
| tech blog from companies, as well as individuals and conferences.
| Every blog is hand picked. There is also AI agent which you can
| use for quick search.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| For data engineering the two best by far I know of:
|
| 1. BI Cortex - sadly seemingly not active anymore:
| https://bicortex.com/
|
| 2. Mark Litwintschik's Tech Blog: https://tech.marksblogg.com/
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(page generated 2025-12-23 23:01 UTC)