Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?

#121

Post by inertial » Fri, Apr 21, 2017, 5:34 PM UTC

ramblenode wrote: post #22

Digital Ocean has some quality posts I've found from Google, though I don't actively follow the blog. https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/

Came here to upvote DO. Most of the companies mentioned here write articles about their products, infra & engineering marvels.What makes DO different is that their articles are written for the end user.They have some of the most helpful articles on setting up servers, from start to end, with examples. Although not all posts are written by their own engineers [1] (nothing wrong, just saying).

[1] https://www.digitalocean.com/community/get-paid-to-write

Re: Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?

#122

Post by tracker1 » Fri, Apr 21, 2017, 5:36 PM UTC

shdon wrote: post #27

I actually really like many of the blogs at Microsoft. It's a bit of a mixed bag, but there's some gems in there. Raymond Chen's blog[1] in particular was good enough to get me to buy his book (which definitely did not disappoint). Other ones I subscribe to are the Microsoft Edge Dev Blog[2] , Mark Russinovich[3] and Games for Windows and the DirectX SDK[4] And there's a few that have unfortunately not been updated f…

Another one from a MS guy...

https://www.hanselman.com/

Re: Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?

#123

Post by praneshp » Fri, Apr 21, 2017, 5:40 PM UTC

Since there are a lot of examples here, I'll mention HighScalability [0], which takes many talks and writes it out as text.

[0] http://highscalability.com/

Re: Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?

#124

Post by scardine » Fri, Apr 21, 2017, 5:44 PM UTC

I think they appeal more to the bootstrappers than to the YC startup crowd - but I like everything from 37 signals.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?

#125

Post by mydpy » Fri, Apr 21, 2017, 5:45 PM UTC

detaro wrote: post #97

PascLeRasc wrote: post #95

https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs is a good curated list

Why do people insist on calling these dumps of all links they can find/get submitted in PRs "curated"?! It has almost 600 entries, with no extra content or structure...

Agreed. Personally I think asking for general blog recommendations is not helpful. I just google topics I'm interested and start to create that list myself.

Also - I think the idea of creating blog followers is becoming less popular. I use aggregators like this to help collect the content and I can filter on my own.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?

#126

Post by Theodores » Fri, Apr 21, 2017, 6:11 PM UTC

ramblenode wrote: post #22

Digital Ocean has some quality posts I've found from Google, though I don't actively follow the blog. https://www.digitalocean.com/company/blog/

Their posts rank well, higher than Stack Overflow for 'how do I install this on Ubuntu' articles plus you know the instructions are highly likely to work without excessive featuritis (certain how to perfect server guides spring to mind).

Along the way one is likely to get a free-ish 'droplet' at some time and the combination of the articles and the occasional droplet use makes one a customer almost by a process of osmosis - it becomes hard to not like Digital Ocean.

I do feel that they may have lost the momentum on the articles though, or maybe I am just not doing so many Ubuntu setup things, whatever the reason I have not used their articles a great deal over the last year.

Does anyone else think they need a bit of a reboot and to update/crank out more articles?

Re: Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?

#127

Post by atYevP » Fri, Apr 21, 2017, 6:18 PM UTC

thesehands wrote: post #11

Backblaze have a good one, with their annual drive failure survey being a highlight: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/

Thanks!

Re: Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?

#128

Post by silent1mezzo » Fri, Apr 21, 2017, 6:22 PM UTC

For those that have started a tech blog for your own engineering teams, how did you get people to write? How did you get buy-in from management?

I'm trying to get our tech blog off the ground but it's difficult to get buy-in from everyone.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?

#129

Post by blimpy » Fri, Apr 21, 2017, 7:16 PM UTC

My co-workers at End Point write some pretty useful posts, with a lot of practical ones around Linux sysadmin and devops topics:

http://blog.endpoint.com/

A bit self-promotional since I blog there too, but I'm greatly outnumbered.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies have the best blogs written by their engineering team?

#130

Post by amingilani » Fri, Apr 21, 2017, 7:42 PM UTC

Disclosure: I'm an Editor at the Toptal Engineering blog.

Toptal has extremely active and wonderful blog for developers[1], designers[2] and finance experts[3].

The reason I can make that claim is because Toptal's blog posts are contributed by members of our network, all of whom are verified experts in their fields, and we guide them through the entire process to help them write the perfect blog post.

We publish new articles almost every day! We invest a lot of love into maintaining our publication and try to publish the most useful content for fellow experts.

[1]: https://www.toptal.com/developers/blog#contract-just-respect...

[2]: https://www.toptal.com/designers/blog#contract-just-respecte...

[3]: https://www.toptal.com/finance/blog#contract-just-respected-...