avatarAli Kamalizade

Summary

The article lists ten favorite software engineering blogs that the author follows to stay updated on industry trends, including insights from major tech companies like Instagram, Netflix, and Airbnb.

Abstract

The author of the article shares their personal selection of top software engineering blogs that provide valuable content written by industry professionals. These blogs cover a range of topics from scalability and data protection at Instagram to accessibility at the BBC and the use of GraphQL at Netflix. The author emphasizes the importance of content that goes beyond marketing, offering practical knowledge and lessons learned. The list includes blogs from LeanIX, GitHub, Wix, Google Developer Experts, PayPal, Airbnb, and Capital One, discussing various technical aspects such as microservices, TypeScript migration, Web Components, and JAMstack. The author also touches on the importance of understanding why software has bugs and how to avoid coupling in microservices architecture. The article concludes by inviting readers to share their favorite engineering blogs.

Opinions

  • The author values blogs written by software engineers and data scientists over those that serve as product marketing.
  • Accessibility improvements in the BBC's design system are seen as a significant enhancement.
  • The author is biased towards LeanIX's blog but includes it for its range of topics from open-source work to explaining software bugs.
  • Netflix's pioneering work with GraphQL is highlighted as an example of rapid development with microservices.
  • GitHub's use of Web Components is commended for promoting reusable components across different JavaScript frameworks.
  • Wix's content on microservices and the technical interview process is recommended for inspiration and motivation.
  • The Google Developer Experts' post on pull request best practices is considered a valuable resource.
  • PayPal's exploration of JAMstack is presented as a beneficial introduction to the concept.
  • Airbnb's development of ts-migrate for large-scale JavaScript to TypeScript migration is noted as particularly interesting for TypeScript enthusiasts.
  • Capital One's sharing of lessons learned in areas like machine learning and microservices design is appreciated, with a focus on avoiding coupling in microservices architecture.

My 10 Favorite Software Engineering Blogs

Stay up to date with the latest trends and learn from experts

Photo by Fotis Fotopoulos on Unsplash

At this point, there’s hardly any bigger tech company that does not have an engineering blog.

In my opinion there are a few characteristics of a good engineering blog:

  • The content is written by people like software engineers or data scientists
  • The blog posts are not just glorified product marketing

In this post I want to share blogs I follow to stay up to date regarding software engineering. Of course, there are way more interesting blogs out there.

Instagram

Instagram is a widely used platform. Hence, it faces a lot of tough engineering challenges (e.g. regarding scalability, data protection). The following is one post about making the web version of Instagram faster by reducing the amount of JavaScript and optimize the execution.

BBC

BBC is not only a broadcasting company but they also employ a capable engineering team. Accessibility is a topic that is often neglected in software products. Hence, I am glad to know how accessibility helped to improve their internal design system.

LeanIX

Disclaimer: naturally, I’m biased about this one. Nevertheless, I want to include LeanIX as the blog is fairly new but the topics range from learnings to open-source work. Here’s a great post which answers a popular question: why software has bugs.

Netflix

Netflix has done a lot of pioneering work in the software engineering world. If you have never heard of GraphQL then I can recommend to take a look at this post. Many companies like Netflix are now creating new APIs entirely with GraphQL instead of REST.

GitHub

GitHub hardly needs any introduction: at this point, most software engineers should have used GitHub at least once. Web Components is a new standard to write and reuse components regardless of any JavaScript framework. Check out this post to learn more about how GitHub uses Web Components.

Wix

Wix is a popular website builder to create websites with no code. Their engineering team shares content about microservices, the technical interview process and more. As someone who likes to create something new I can recommend this post for some motivation.

Google Developer Experts

You may have heard about the GDE program. There is a lot of knowledge shared as there are various topics covered related to Google technologies. I like this post about best practices regarding pull requests.

PayPal

PayPal is a widely used service to pay people or businesses in an easy way. If you’ve ever been interested into the idea of the JAMstack then this is a good entry into the topic.

Airbnb

Airbnb should be known to most of you. As a fan of TypeScript I like their work on ts-migrate which Airbnb has developed to migrate large code bases from JavaScript to TypeScript.

Capital One

Working in a finance company does not mean to only work with legacy systems. The engineers at Capital One are regularly sharing their lessons learned in areas like machine learning, cloud infrastructure and web performance. I like this post about ways to avoid coupling in microservices design as many companies are struggling with following the microservices mindset.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading this post about my favorite tech blogs. Which engineering blogs are you following? Let me know in the comments.

Programming
Blog
Tech
Software Engineering
Blogging
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