126 comments

  • pella 2 days ago
  • iancmceachern a day ago

    It's so interesting to me as a Mechanical Engineer and Hardware designer/architect how on HN "Engineering" almost always means "Software engineering" here.

    • throwaway4PP a day ago

      It is funny, almost as funny as an entire cadre of people with “engineer” in their title who've never had to draw a free body diagram, learn circuit analysis, understand the basics of thermodynamics, or the mechanics of materials.

      • p2detar a day ago

        I hold a CS master degree from an Eastern European university and everything you listed was in our Bachelor degree program. It’s pretty funny because while studying material properties back then I always wondered how and when am I gonna use that. It kind of makes sense now that I think about it - some students preferred branching out to hardware.

        edit: typo

        • throwaway4PP a day ago

          That’s great, unfortunately it is quite rare for CS undergrad programs in the US to require the basic engineering and science classes the other engineering/science majors require.

          • zahlman a day ago

            Do you not have separate "software engineering" and "computer science" undergrad streams?

            • aduty a day ago

              At most places, no. Lol.

    • CommenterPerson a day ago

      Hear hear. The word "Technology" has also been redefined to mean computer or phone stuff. As a real (manly) engineer, this pisses me off no end! :-)

      To answer the OP, this Civil engineering blog / video site is really good. I always learn something new, and his enthusiasm is infectious. Well worth giving it a look:

      https://practical.engineering/

    • jvanderbot a day ago

      I would love more blogs on mechanical, hardware, and especially industrial engineering, but the demographics in those areas skew stereo-typically older and also likely less blog-oriented, right?

      • georgeburdell a day ago

        Blogs are almost 30 years old at this point, but yes, I do associate a nearly compulsive need to show off one's work in meticulously-crafted blog posts with younger people.

      • UntappedShelf21 a day ago

        Would you consider Chris Boden the type of content you’re interested in? https://youtube.com/@physicsduck?si=WJS3UbDF0VWKwOgy

      • wheelinsupial a day ago

        Depending on what you're looking for in industrial engineering, there are a lot of blogs on lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System. INFORMS, may be paywalled, also publishes a lot of pretty interesting articles on applications of operations research to industry.

        In general, though, my very limited experience working in manufacturing was that much of the blog equivalents were covered in things like white papers from hardware manufacturers or articles in trade publications. We always had a bunch of magazines delivered each month and there were usually some interesting articles to review.

    • beechiaseed 5 hours ago

      one of the few places I’ve found that consistently talks about hardware / manufacturing stuff is https://hardwarefyi.com, i read it pretty religiously

    • nishilpatel a day ago

      Fair Observation, HN surrounded by mostly Software guys, which directly add nuances of "Engineering" and <Software> Engineering.

      but to specific is much important, imo Engineering means "Solving problem at a scale", irrelevant of the industry.

      • h3half 14 hours ago

        Perhaps. Sometimes the scale is "one" - the amount of engineering that goes into bespoke space missions is very large, and very little of that work is re-used for anything other than direct follow up missions

    • metadope a day ago

      I remember feeling sheepish when I was hired to a position titled 'Software Engineer'. To me, those two words together seemed incongruent. Not quite an oxymoron but certainly a puzzlement.

      Maybe, generously, in retrospect, an aspiration?

      I never considered myself an actual engineer; I was (and still am) a self-taught un-credentialed computer programmer. More art than science. They made me take the title and the stock options and the business cards.

      I mostly worked for and with EEs, making software tools for test automation. I was a fanboy hardware wannabee (and still am), got some on me but was never a true engineer. I learned from those who practiced their discipline; it was plain to me the reality of real engineering versus what I was doing.

      I suppose in my travels I have on occasion encountered a true Software Engineer. I suppose there's reason to hope that software development will continue to mature and evolve, and eventually the other engineering disciplines will accept software as a science.

      For me, it will always be a joy to make that hardware work with my twiddly bits. Not engineering, no. But very rewarding work that often resembles engineering.

    • eru 21 hours ago

      Well, engineer without any qualification used to refer only to combat engineers. (The term civil engineering betrays that history.)

      Words change meaning over time and with the audience.

    • jupin a day ago

      I thought the same. Check out this mechanical engineering channel - https://youtu.be/8yUsDnBXo_g?si=CXzWV9D5OvHcCBm3

    • sp4nner a day ago

      Agreed, though I understand the YC bias. I'm in biotech and mostly follow HN just to see what the software people are interested in these days.

    • mrandish a day ago

      Yeah, even as a software engineering type I immediately thought the question was too broadly posed. I assume the OP must have had something narrower in mind.

    • tekno45 a day ago

      people building physical things are probably too busy to blog about it lol

  • xnorswap 2 days ago

    You might be more interested in books than a blog.

    For example: The Architecture of Open Source Applications

    https://aosabook.org/en/index.html

    • alhirzel 2 days ago

      Such a great resource!

    • leoh a day ago

      Absolutely fantastic, thank you!

  • simonw 2 days ago

    This post by Jay Kreps that introduced Kafka to the world remains one of my favorite pieces of engineering blog content of all time: https://engineering.linkedin.com/distributed-systems/log-wha...

  • sateesh 2 days ago

    https://jvns.ca/ Not a tech. company blog. Explains technical concepts clearly and top notch technical posts. Fits 1,2, 3 criteria of what you ask, though not the 4th one.

    • john-tells-all a day ago

      Strong recommend! Julia's posts are always really engaging and educational.

      She also publishes a number of technical topics as ZINES. I bought her "Oh Shit, Git!" zine and learned a ton of useful info, despite having decades in the industry.Zines are a great way to encourage book-allergic coworkers into learning great material.

      https://wizardzines.com/

    • skywhopper a day ago

      Yes! Julia is fantastic at explaining concepts, and creating ways to learn about them. She produces a great series of “zines” summarizing a bunch of technical topics, her blog archives are really fascinating, and she’s created really useful tools like Mess With DNS (https://messwithdns.net) which gives you your own DNS subdomain and the means to update records so you can try things out in an easy, harmless way.

  • Okkef 2 days ago

    Armin Ronacher's blog (of flask/jinja fame) https://lucumr.pocoo.org/

    Antirez' blog (of Redis fame) https://antirez.com/

    Simon Willison's blog (about AI) https://simonwillison.net/

  • yrand 2 days ago

    Encountered one specific example about a month ago here on HackerNews - All about automotive lidar. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46110395

    Blog posts where I find quality really shows are usually about something I know next to nothing about how it works. A badly written article usually either goes really shallow or skips some facts when going into depth and requires catchup elsewhere to actually understand it. The lidar article from Main Street Autonomy goes beyond basics and explained everything from the ground up in such a connected way that it was a real pleasure reading it.

  • qznc 2 days ago

    Sounds like you look for an intersection of academic papers (1.), tech blogs (2.), text books (3.), and confidential business strategies (4.)? A very high ambition.

    • cess11 a day ago

      Corporations commonly describe some of their internal processes and achievements because it builds reputation and that can be important for both sales and recruitment.

      Sometimes they do it in the form of free or open source software releases.

    • gchamonlive 2 days ago

      A very high ambition?

  • aranw a day ago

    https://samwho.dev has some fantastic blog posts with great visualisations

  • bzGoRust 2 days ago
  • nsm a day ago

    https://randomascii.wordpress.com/ - former Chrome engineer about all things performance engineering and particularly focused on Windows.

  • nchmy 2 days ago

    You're probably looking for something that is more focused on specific software decisions/implementations, but https://infrequently.org is the best web development blog out there.

    It's not "technical" so much as it just educates you on how to be a good web developer/run a team. There's zero fluff and considerable detail (footnotes are practically blog posts themselves).

  • eru 21 hours ago

    Jane Street has a good one at https://blog.janestreet.com/

    https://www.redblobgames.com/ is not strictly speaking a blog, but an interested collection of articles on algorithmic concepts you might want to know for writing games.

  • Swizec a day ago

    While not exactly a blog, I've collected ~16 years of [startup] engineering lessons into a book and I think it came out fantastic. People are saying super nice things.

    https://scalingfastbook.com

  • vmilner 14 hours ago

    I enjoy

    https://destevez.net/about/

    from a Phd maths guy, who's worked in satellite comms, and blogs on software defined radio and comms protocols (eg error correction and radio modulation, often in space related contexts, eg decoding Voyager comms).

  • tekichan 2 days ago
  • tester756 2 days ago
  • ludicity 2 days ago

    I'm a huge fan of https://eblog.fly.dev/index.html. The author, Efron, very graciously advises me on a lot of little things around my engineering practice, and I've learned a huge amount about weird holes in my practice from industry dysfunction in a very short period of time from him.

  • jupin a day ago

    To balance all of the computer engineering blogs, check out this mechanical engineering channel: https://youtu.be/8yUsDnBXo_g?si=CXzWV9D5OvHcCBm3

  • noam_k 2 days ago
  • avisk 2 days ago
  • jurakovic a day ago

    I maintain list of blogs together with "RSS reader" for personal purposes, but it's publicly available here:

    https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/#blogs-general

    https://jurakovic.github.io/dev-links/news/

  • bodash a day ago

    > https://lessnews.dev

    A while ago I felt this "information fatigue" due to the overwhelming updates from the typical news sources (reddit, twitter, even hn).

    So I built a _slow_ webdev newsfeed aggregator that doesn't overwhelm you of constant updates, so you focus on reading the actual blog contents and enjoy other things.

    • ewoodrich a day ago

      I bookmarked to take a closer look later, but I'm a little unclear on the premise, could you explain what you mean by "slow"/how it is filtered/curated?

      • bodash a day ago

        Sure.

        Problem I had with the other newsfeeds is that I get distracted by the constant updates, always refresh the front-page, skipping the actual content and just skimming through headlines and comments.

        So I built this one, set it as my homepage, and because it doesn't update often, I will actually read the content of the links. When I'm done, I move on to other things in life.

        It's curated by matching keywords (focusing on web development) on HN, mostly automated but with few manual adjustments now and then.

  • thundergolfer 2 days ago
  • primaprashant a day ago

    Anyone specifically looking for ML engineering blogs should find this useful: https://github.com/primaprashant/ml-engineering-blogs

    • 61j3t a day ago

      Thanks a lot, I was literally gonna type whether anyone knows good ML blogs

  • jonstewart a day ago

    Not corporate, but two of the best individual developer blogs are Eli Bendersky's and Rachel by the Bay. They've both been blogging prolifically for a decade+, Eli with a focus on, broadly, compilers and Rachel on SRE/debugging.

    Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing is also required reading for anyone that works with Windows.

    https://eli.thegreenplace.net/

    https://rachelbythebay.com/w/

    https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

  • iillexial a day ago

    Hey! Check out https://devblogs.sh. It's a curated library with tech blog from companies, as well as individuals and conferences. Every blog is hand picked. There is also AI agent which you can use for quick search.

  • pveierland 2 days ago

    Tweag has many interesting entries with good technical depth:

    https://www.tweag.io/blog

  • nickmonad 2 days ago
  • stack_framer a day ago

    I've found Shopify's blog interesting (and I don't happen to use Shopify or have any affiliation with them):

    https://shopify.engineering

  • bretthopper a day ago
  • mkosmul 2 days ago

    Allegro Tech Blog: https://blog.allegro.tech/

  • NickJLange a day ago

    A lot of great links here to the firehose (or at least for working parents). Unless someone has built it - anything that aggregates and shows beyond the first click of the by-line. (i.e. a first paragraph, or LLM-summary of the content)?

    Otherwise... coming soon from a vibe-coding session near you...

    • SleepySteve_sk a day ago

      We're currently building something to solve this problem.

      https://joinheader.com/

      We'll filter an RSS feed based on the topic and description that you provide. Feel free to reach out to me at s.kufuor@<domain> if you have any questions or feedback.

    • soulofmischief a day ago

      A friend and I worked on a startup together that did this back when only the GPT-3 API was available. Sucked up everything we could think of, including HN and traditionally opaque sources such as Telegram

  • rcarmo a day ago

    I'm grouping most of the suggestions here into my feed summarizer at https://feeds.carmo.io - there will be an "Engineering" bulletin there soon.

  • alzamos 2 days ago

    Francesco Mazzoli’s blog on https://mazzo.li/archive.html. His blog has topped HN a few times with various low-level/linux topics, some deep dives into algorithms etc.

  • mitthrowaway2 a day ago

    I always enjoyed Jason Sachs' blog at embedded related.

    https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/152.php

  • sevazhidkov 2 days ago

    It’s not a traditional blog, but Oxide’s RFDs cover exactly what you asked — implementation details and trade-offs: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/

  • vishnuharidas a day ago

    https://engineeringblogs.xyz/ is a good place listing more than 500 (and adding more) engineering blogs.

  • agumonkey a day ago

    Often enjoyed article by chris wellons https://nullprogram.com/

    quite diverse, often challenging, sometimes mind bending

  • ruraljuror a day ago

    The book Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann covers exactly the topics you are asking about and references many blog posts.

  • louiechristie 2 days ago
  • sdairs 2 days ago
  • vogu66 2 days ago

    not software engineering, but https://practical.engineering/

  • robofanatic 2 days ago
  • GeoAtreides 2 days ago

    Seems to me you're describing books.

  • Agingcoder 2 days ago

    Cloudflare, google project zero.

  • mad44 a day ago

    MongoDB Engineering Blog is shaping up well

    https://www.mongodb.com/company/blog/channel/engineering-blo...

  • louiechristie 2 days ago
  • vibesareoff 2 days ago

    Ask the LLM you wrote this post with!

    • robofanatic a day ago

      No need to harshly judge the OP for merely using a tool. Also you wouldn’t have known some of the blogs listed here if he hadn’t asked it publicly.

    • voxleone a day ago

      No judgement here whatsoever, but i think LLM would be "the" tool for this job. I also wonder if there's any point to "Ask" sections in websites after LLM's.

    • bell-cot 2 days ago

      OP is asking a good question. There's no dishonor if he is not fluent in English, and used an LLM to translate.

      • vibesareoff 2 days ago

        "OP" couldn't even be bothered to reformat the numbered list to run on separate fucking lines.

        But sure, cheer on the homogenization of online spaces into beige slop staccato bullshit!

        ˙ ͜ʟ˙

        • loloquwowndueo a day ago

          How do you reformat a list so it runs on separate fucking lines?

          Always happens to me (and I don’t use fucking LLMs) so I’d really like to know.

        • fnordlord 2 days ago

          I will always cheer on anyone who shares their curiosity.

          It was a great question and now I have a ton of new things on my reading list.

        • self_awareness a day ago

          You seem to be new here, so you probably don't know that:

          - Even if you separate each point with a new line, - HN formatter will join everything to one line anyway. - So it's not OP's fault his points are in the same line, because the source post has them in separate lines.

          • back2reddit 18 hours ago

            Join

            date

            of

            an

            account

            means

            nothing,

            bro.

            Gold

            star

            for

            the

            decade

            of

            participation

            though!

        • CamperBob2 a day ago

          Other sites beckon.

        • bell-cot 2 days ago

          You seem to be picking metrics for their utility in angrily excluding people who you a priori despise. :(

    • sieste 2 days ago

      The LLM instructed him to gather training data.

      • ozim 2 days ago

        So prompt injection on humans

        • sieste 2 days ago

          Polluting the internet with meat slop.

          • themafia 2 days ago

            "What if we used more energy and got worse results?"

            Sort of makes you miss "move fast and break things."

    • asupkay a day ago

      Maybe the LLM is the one asking

  • corbet a day ago

    I feel obligated to mention LWN - https://lwn.net/ - since that is exactly what we aspire to.

  • nothans a day ago

    MathWorks Blogs

  • mitjam 2 days ago

    Maybe it's just because I'm LLMing a bit too much, recently, but this question sounds to me like a prompt.

    • x187463 2 days ago

      Some people act like the use of an LLM immediately invalidates or lowers the value of a piece of content. But the case of a question or simple post, especially by somebody for whom English is second language, using an LLM to rephrase or clean-up some text seems like an innocent and practical use case for LLMs.

    • runlaszlorun 2 days ago

      I'm not beating up on OP but I chuckled when I read the question. Literally the only place I see the phrase "no fluff" with any frequency is with Deepseek lol.

      Nothing wrong with the phrase itself of course, other than the fact that it's like literally in every other reply for me lol.

    • atoav 2 days ago

      Had the same thought. ChatGPT often tells me things like: "This is the hard truth" or "I am telling it to you as it is (no fluff)" or whatever. Just because my initial prompt contains a line about it not making things up and telling me how things are instead of what would please me to hear. I added a line to specifically tell it to not phrase out these things, but it appears to be surprisingly hard to get rid of those phrases.

  • georgemcbay a day ago

    > best engineering blogs with real-world depth?

    The best ever is, IMO, Charles Bloom's blog, especially if you have any interest in data compression:

    https://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/

    But it is no longer regularly updated.

  • thenaturalist a day ago

    For data engineering the two best by far I know of:

    1. BI Cortex - sadly seemingly not active anymore: https://bicortex.com/

    2. Mark Litwintschik's Tech Blog: https://tech.marksblogg.com/

  • rramadass 2 days ago

    Not a blog, but books detailing real-world experiences from Indian Engineers/Scientists/Researchers; Quite inspiring to see how people strive unceasingly towards a goal in spite of all the limitations and hurdles (viz. Political/Financial/Material etc.) imposed on them.

    There is much to learn, in these books.

    The Mind of an Engineer by Purnendu Ghosh et al. - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-10-0119-2

    The Mind of an Engineer: Volume 2 by Purnendu Ghosh et al. - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-15-1330-5

  • throw_await 2 days ago

    oldnewthing

  • snvzz 2 days ago

    For deeper understanding of seL4's developments and the historical context in which it appeared, Gernot Heiser's blog[0].

    0. https://microkerneldude.org/

  • Joel_Mckay 2 days ago

    These should be read at least once in your life if interested in building industrial grade electrical, mechanical, and or software.

    1. https://nepp.nasa.gov/whisker/

    2. https://standards.nasa.gov/standard/NASA/NASA-STD-87394

    3. https://standards.nasa.gov/NASA-Technical-Standards

    4. https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/workmanship

    5. https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf

    6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_10:_Rules_for_Dev...

    7. https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/laboratory-metrology/metrology-...

    8. https://www.mitutoyo.com/training-education/

    9. "Memoirs of extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds" (Charles Mackay, 1852, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm )

    The artifacts are usually beautiful from good Workmanship Standards, Design For Manufacturability, and systematic Metrology. Dragging us all into the future one project at a time.

    Note that training an ML model with such data would be pointless, as statistical saliency forms a paradox with consumer product design compromises. Note, there are _always_ tradeoffs in every problem domain.

    'What it actually means to be "AI Generated"' ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERiXDhLHxmo )

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXbzktx1KfU

    Have a nice day, and note >52% of the web is LLM slop now. YMMV =3

  • gethly 2 days ago

    There are no such blogs. Usually companies, or individuals, will write these after they implement some feature into their products. Which makes them inherently little pieces of information scattered all over the internet and there is no one blog that is just about this.

    • nishilpatel 21 hours ago

      That’s true. This kind of writing usually shows up as post-implementation retrospectives, so it’s inherently fragmented.

      I’m trying to surface and study those scattered examples—especially the ones that explain why decisions were made, not just what was built.