Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?

29 comments

• sdairs 1 minute ago
  https://clickhouse.com/blog?category=engineering
• pella 2 hours ago
  > 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 )

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  • i_k 2 hours ago
    I am quite surprised and a bit disappointed that almost none of them have RSS.

    But thank you!

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    • onion2k 1 hour ago
      Spotify and Tailscale do...

      https://engineering.atspotify.com/feed

      https://tailscale.com/blog/index.xml
    • petercooper 1 hour ago
      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
    • embedding-shape 1 hour ago
      > 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".

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      • zbentley 57 minutes ago
        What? That makes no sense. RSS is beloved and known among engineers. Marketers? Not so much.
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        • embedding-shape 56 minutes ago
          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 :)

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          • zbentley 55 minutes ago
            Oh, I read your post backwards (thought you said RSS == more likely fluff). My fault, sorry!
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            • embedding-shape 44 minutes ago
              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!
• yrand 2 hours ago
  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 2 hours ago
  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.
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  • gchamonlive 2 hours ago
    A very high ambition?
• alzamos 25 minutes ago
  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.
• xnorswap 2 hours ago
  You might be more interested in books than a blog.

  For example: The Architecture of Open Source Applications

  https://aosabook.org/en/index.html

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  • alhirzel 1 hour ago
    Such a great resource!
• avisk 39 minutes ago
  https://technology.riotgames.com/ https://fabiensanglard.net/
• Okkef 1 hour ago
  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/
• sevazhidkov 48 minutes ago
  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/
• thundergolfer 1 hour ago
  - https://modal.com/blog/vprox - https://modal.com/blog/host-overhead-inference-efficiency - https://modal.com/blog/resource-solver
• nchmy 2 hours ago
  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).
• mkosmul 1 hour ago
  Allegro Tech Blog: https://blog.allegro.tech/
• tester756 2 hours ago
  Maybe

  https://projectzero.google/archive.html

  https://netflixtechblog.medium.com/

  https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/engineering/
• nickmonad 41 minutes ago
  TigerBeetle: https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/
• bzGoRust 1 hour ago
  https://discord.com/blog https://blog.cloudflare.com/ https://netflixtechblog.com/
• ludicity 2 hours ago
  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.
• pveierland 2 hours ago
  Tweag has many interesting entries with good technical depth:

  https://www.tweag.io/blog
• tekichan 2 hours ago
  http://highscalability.squarespace.com/all-time-favorites/
• louiechristie 1 hour ago
  https://dora.dev/research/2025/dora-report/
• gethly 2 hours ago
  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.
• noam_k 1 hour ago
  https://lcamtuf.substack.com/
• vogu66 2 hours ago
  not software engineering, but https://practical.engineering/
• vibesareoff 2 hours ago
  Ask the LLM you wrote this post with!
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  • sieste 1 hour ago
    The LLM instructed him to gather training data.
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    • ozim 1 hour ago
      So prompt injection on humans
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      • sieste 1 hour ago
        Polluting the internet with meat slop.
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        • themafia 1 hour ago
          "What if we used more energy and got worse results?"

          Sort of makes you miss "move fast and break things."
  • bell-cot 1 hour ago
    OP is asking a good question. There's no dishonor if he is not fluent in English, and used an LLM to translate.
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    • vibesareoff 49 minutes ago
      >There's no dishonor if he is not fluent in English, and used an LLM to translate.

      "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.

      https://eqbench.com/slop-score.html

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      • bell-cot 31 minutes ago
        You seem to be picking metrics for their utility in angrily excluding people who you a priori despise. :(
• Agingcoder 2 hours ago
  Cloudflare, google project zero.
• snvzz 35 minutes ago
  For deeper understanding of seL4's developments and the historical context in which it appeared, Gernot Heiser's blog[0].

  0. https://microkerneldude.org/
• louiechristie 1 hour ago
  https://youtube.com/@modernsoftwareengineeringyt
• throw_await 2 hours ago
  oldnewthing
• Joel_Mckay 1 hour ago
  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
• mitjam 2 hours ago
  Maybe it's just because I'm LLMing a bit too much, recently, but this question sounds to me like a prompt.
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  • runlaszlorun 1 hour ago
    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.
  • atoav 1 hour ago
    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.