What are some good software development/open source blogs?

February 15, 2006 10:49 AM

What are the best software development/open source blogs?

I'm trying to find the most useful/influential blogs read by the software development community, ranging from really detailed code-level blogs to ones that muse on the general trials and tribulations of the development process. I'm also interested in blogs on open source topics. I've been using all the various searches and indexes, but I have a pretty small list, and my gut tells me that there must be a big blog presence for these kinds of topics. If you're into those topics, what blogs do you read? If you're not, do you know of any that other people read?

posted by TunnelArmr to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

everyone loves joel for some reason.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 10:52 AM on February 15, 2006

Signal vs Noise, the blog of the never-short-on-opinion 37 Signals (Basecamp, etc) folks. If you're interested in Rails & Ruby apps there's Riding on Rails.
posted by phearlez at 11:00 AM on February 15, 2006

The Old New Thing is a blog by Raymond Chen, a well-known Windows programmer at Microsoft. His posts range from detailed programming stuff through to general development practises and anecdotes, and he often posts about non-computer-related topics as well.
posted by chrismear at 11:07 AM on February 15, 2006

Wisecracks aside, there are a TON of great MSDN blogs by very smart people at Redmond. Raymond Chen is one. Larry Osterman is another, as well as Michael Kaplan who does numerous posts on i18n and l10n, are a couple of others. You basically just need to start reading a couple and you will quickly find out others as lots of them interlink and mention each other frequently.

Jeremy Zawodny's blog is highly regarded, but he tends to cover a wide range of topics other than just software/web development.
posted by Rhomboid at 11:23 AM on February 15, 2006

Two blogs I visit regularly:

ComputerZen - Scott Hanselman's blog. Has a popular "useful tools" list, and recently started a good podcast called Hanselminutes.

Coding Horror - Jeff Atwood's blog. Covers a wide-range of topics that programmers are generally interested in. He's authored some good Code Project articles too.

They are both .NET-centric, since that's what I've been developing in.
posted by ding3r at 11:27 AM on February 15, 2006

jwz's livejournal is sort of all over the place, but fun to read.
posted by The Jesse Helms at 11:56 AM on February 15, 2006

Ward's Wiki is a good place to read about software engineering processes, and is updated very frequently. Not really a blog though, not that there's anything wrong with that.
posted by soundslikeobiwan at 12:43 PM on February 15, 2006

The Ximian/Mono/Novell cabal of Miguel de Icaza, Nat Friedman, Robert Love, and Joe Shaw are all updated frequently and are entertaining. I'll second the JWZ and Joel Spolsky recommendations, and first Asa Dotzler, but not for software writing as much as for writing in general. Alan Cox's was fascinating before he switched to writing it in Welsh (now it's just fascinating if you read Welsh and his wife Telsa Gwynne seems to have stopped writing as well). Finally, you can certainly find some interesting ones at the aggregation sites found under the umbrella of PlanetPlanet.
posted by togdon at 1:06 PM on February 15, 2006

http://www.thedailywtf.com/ is an endlessly entertaining guide to how not to develop software.
posted by simonw at 5:22 PM on February 15, 2006

Jebus H. Chris. Paul Graham!. He writes essays, not blog entries, but is very good.
posted by gsteff at 9:50 PM on February 15, 2006

Code Snipers, which I haven't really followed, but came across as I was going through my bookmarks.
posted by furtive at 10:39 PM on February 15, 2006