Best blog and news sites for web developers?

July 29, 2010 6:04 PM

Are you a web developer who works with Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Apache, Linux, jQuery and so forth? What (professional) blogs and news sites do you read?

I do web development in Rails for a small startup. For a long time, I've more or less worked in a vacuum, but I'd like to change that.

I have a long list of trashy blogs and news sites I frequent. I'd like to replace them with healthier choices -- things that will help expose me to new but relevant technologies, or just neat tricks with the technologies I already know. What sites do you recommend?

I am already fairly familiar with local user groups, mailing lists, and print media. I'm specifically interested in blogs and news sites that I could add to my web-surfing rotation.

posted by fogster to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I've found planetrubyonrails.com to be helpful as an aggregate of a lot of the well-known ruby/rails web presence. Unfortunately, I can't get more detailed at the moment as I'm having some network issues connecting to my work machine where my rss subscription list resides.

A couple off the top of my head (though potentially included in the above):

railstips
/r/ruby
posted by hominid211 at 7:27 PM on July 29, 2010

I'm not a Ruby developer (PHP), but one of my favorite tech link farms is http://delicious.com/popular. It's because of that place I've learned about Redis, NoSQL, HTML5, etc. It's pretty great.

Other places I visit for my LAMP fix are Dzone and The Daily WTF. And actually, it could do you well to peruse Popurls from time to time. It's a decent link aggregator, mixing in techy stuff with trashy news on a black background.
posted by leo. at 9:25 PM on July 29, 2010

(FYI: The Daily WTF isn't so much as "what to do" but more a "what not to do. ever." type site. Worth a laugh, or at least to exercise your empathy gene).
posted by leo. at 9:26 PM on July 29, 2010

I have 41 bloggers in my feed reader under the "Coders" folder. I generally follow the blogs of programmers rather than professional bloggers. As a result, they're not all gems but the people who post the least interesting stuff seem to also post the least frequently, so no big deal.

Many popular open source projects have a "planet" aggregator of somehow relevant members of the community. Planet Debian, Planet Ubuntu, Planet Django, etc. Planet Ubuntu has gotten a bit out of hand, I think.

Specific tips:

"Bunnie" Huang, hardware engineer who also helped hax the original xbox
Jacob Kaplan-Moss (a mefite I think!)
Luis von Ahn
This dude who hacks on x264 codecs
Dave Jones, kernel hacker
Ted T'so, kernel hacker
guido von russum?
Steve Yegge, a guy who with opinions who writes too much ;)
the only microsoft guy I know of who writes interesting stuff (its a shame his blog doesn't parse half the time)
gcc hacker
Matthew Garrett, kernel hacker
Nintendo DS homebrew author
Wii homebrew hacker
Josh Berkus , Postgres hacker
posted by pwnguin at 9:48 PM on July 29, 2010 [3 favorites]

reddit and http://delicious.com/tag/ruby for me too

regards
Bussiere
posted by bussiere at 2:08 AM on July 30, 2010

/.
posted by annsunny at 7:53 AM on July 30, 2010

StackOverflow's ruby and other tags.
posted by gregglind at 9:45 AM on July 30, 2010

Posts on the O'Reilly Radar blog are often interesting.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 3:00 PM on July 30, 2010