What programming/IT blogs do you frequent?

March 30, 2005 9:07 AM

I love TheDailyWTF and read /. every day. Without signing up for some members' only site, are there any IT-related blogs/sites you check out daily? Personally I'd love to read about programming (PHP/Python/Ruby/hell even VB script), databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL/MSSQL), and network administration. For general science news, I already check out Google Sci-Tech News and Technocrat on a regular basis. I'm not looking for l33t XHTML/CSS-hacks but rather blogs that discuss emerging programming trends with meaningful discussion. Maybe something that is a mix of Ask, Developers, and IT on Slashdot. If there's a demand for such a site maybe I'll start one. But I'm too lazy to create something if it's already out there.
posted by chime to Computers & Internet (20 answers total)

OSNews is pretty handy, but the comment sections are rarely insightful.
posted by cmonkey at 9:17 AM on March 30, 2005

I read both The Old New Thing and Joel on Software religiously.
posted by grouse at 9:19 AM on March 30, 2005

Some of Sun's blogs are pretty good, if you're a Solaris nerd. Click through the most popular links on the right, and I'm sure you'll find something interesting. I hit John Clingan's blog in particular from time to time.

A List Apart is really good for HTML/CSS/JS/DOM topics. Some people who consider themselves real developers look down on web tech, but they're losing out, IMHO.

grouse: "I read both The Old New Thing and Joel on Software religiously."

Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing is an entertaining read, too. It's mostly technical coding Windows stuff, but from time to time, he throws in an old-timer Microsoft insider story, like where do Windows 3.x windows go when you minimize them?
posted by Plutor at 9:28 AM on March 30, 2005

Best answer: Have you seen lambda-the-ultimate?
posted by AmaAyeRrsOonN at 9:31 AM on March 30, 2005

Possibly not exactly what you're looking for, but I've recently read through all of Paul Graham's essays. I frequently found myself shouting "Paul Graham, please get out of my head" as he eloquently and succinctly phrased something that I'd been mush-headedly and vaguely thinking for years.
posted by Capn at 9:39 AM on March 30, 2005

Best answer: Here's some more:

Tucows Developers' Hangout

Artima Buzz has collections of RSS feeds by technology/programming language.

Also, google for "planet [insert programming language here]". You'll find sites like Planet Lisp and Planet python. They're collections of feeds from blogs that comment on their respective languages.

I've got a lot of others: you can check my bloglines subscriptions for more.
posted by AmaAyeRrsOonN at 9:48 AM on March 30, 2005

lambda is perhaps a bit heavy going these days, but this is a second vote for it (disclaimer - i was involved in it early on, before the clever people arrived).
posted by andrew cooke at 10:18 AM on March 30, 2005

Best answer: You'll like the old new thing if you've ever done windows coding.

Here are some a friend recommended to me:
ongoing
HERF considered harmfull
stevencl's WebLog
Ian Bicking: A Blog
on the thought
kurt miller's homepage
joel on software (his essays are excelent. Actualy I asked my friend "are there any other blogs like joel on software?
marktaw.com
posted by delmoi at 10:29 AM on March 30, 2005

I do not understand the love for Joel On Software; I have him in my Bloglines but can't remember why, and every single goddamned post in the last 3 months from him has been "OMG DID YOU KNOW I WRITE THIS PROGRAM CALLED FOGBUGZ ITS RLY COOL". :( What am I missing?
posted by cyrusdogstar at 10:41 AM on March 30, 2005

Look through the content in Joel's archives. He doesn't write the good, big articles very often, and in between there's a lot of stuff about the company and their products.
posted by smackfu at 10:46 AM on March 30, 2005

Yea, that must have been what got me to add the feed in the first place; but now whenever I see new stuff in his section on Bloglines I tend to just mentally skip right over it, assuming it's more noise. Plus using your blog to constantly plug your company's software really rubs me the wrong way. Bleh.

Thanks for all the suggestions, some of these are really cool :) I have none to add of my own, unfortunately, aside from Bruce Schneier's blog (link) for the security side of things. Not exactly what was asked for, but important nonetheless ;)
posted by cyrusdogstar at 10:52 AM on March 30, 2005

Response by poster: Wow these are a lot of good links. I personally like lambda and I was looking for more links like that. Used to be a big fan of Joel & his blog (bought his book etc.) but lately his topics don't interest me. I check out The Old New Thing every week or so. Paul Graham's essays show up on Slashdot once a month.

The Tucows & Artima links seem pretty good and so do the personal blogs that delmoi listed. Thanks and keep them coming.

On preview: Entries from Bruce's blog are frequently linked from other sites so even if you don't go there everyday, you don't miss out much.
posted by chime at 10:59 AM on March 30, 2005

How about del.icio.us/tag/php or the like. You can also import it into your RSS reeder if you'd like.
posted by pwb503 at 11:26 AM on March 30, 2005

http://blogs.msdn.com/ is a good start.
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/visualbasic/dotnet/ is a good .net blog
and http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/security/investigator/ is an entertaining security blog.
posted by propagandist at 11:48 AM on March 30, 2005

perlmonks.org for perl.
posted by callmejay at 12:31 PM on March 30, 2005

Varlena's General Bits for PostgreSQL.
posted by nicwolff at 3:31 PM on March 30, 2005

Daily Rotation is a good aggregator of tech sites that allows you to customize it without signing up for an account.
posted by entropy at 3:31 PM on March 30, 2005

I've got sets under Development and Python here.
posted by yerfatma at 5:31 PM on March 30, 2005

http://www.kernelplanet.org/

http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/
posted by PenDevil at 3:54 AM on March 31, 2005

Sam Ruby's Intertwingly is fantastically good, and Sam's responsible for a lotta the work behind the scenes on the LAMP stack. The only downside is that he's sometimes so far ahead of the rest of us that you don't understand a post he makes until 6 months or a year later.
posted by anildash at 9:07 PM on March 31, 2005